Delanceyplace

delanceyplace.com 5/18/12 - two small-town presidents

Fri, 18 May 2012 03:25:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - between the tenures of two big-city presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy - described by historian Arthur Schlesinger as "patrician, urbane, cultivated, inquisitive, gallant" - came two small-town presidents, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower - described in a Newsweek issue of the time as the Kennedys' "dowdy" predecessors. Though they clashed, Truman and Eisenhower had much in common and grew up only 163 miles apart in Independence, Missouri and Abilene, Kansas:

"Harry S Truman and Dwight David Eisenhower, the last American presidents to be born in the nineteenth century, would have much in common. They were both ... grandsons of farmers. They were both sons of fathers who were respected but whose lives were interrupted by failure; both were children of forceful mothers in strong families. As we have seen, they were both small-town boys (in 1890, Abilene's population was 3,547; Independence's, 6,380).

"Each of them was born, as the result of reverses in his father's work life, in small towns (Truman in Lamar, Missouri, population 2,036; Eisenhower in Denison, Texas, population 10,768). They were both from the lower-middle class (John Truman, a mule trader; David Eisenhower, a mechanic at a dairy); both were educated in the small town's public schools; both were brought up in a low-church Protestant denomination (Truman a Baptist, Eisenhower an Anabaptist). Both would occasionally refer to the planet Earth, as no other recent president would be likely to do, as 'God's footstool.' Both were graduated, as we have noted, in a class with more girls than boys from the small town's one high school.

"They were both externally minded sons of the middle border, active, purposeful. They both did well in school. They both liked history. They both were drawn to generals. They both admired Robert E. Lee, and both of them admired and knew about Hannibal. Neither of them was likely to become a lyric poet or a metaphysician.

"Both worked hard when young (Truman at J. H. Clinton's Drug Store; Eisenhower at the Belle Springs Dairy). Neither had an assured college future. Harry Truman wanted to go to West Point but accidentally (because of his eyes) could not; Dwight Eisenhower had no particular desire to go there but accidentally did go.

"They were both conscientious midwesterners with a strong sense of duty. They would both spend their entire careers in public service. They were both honest with respect to money. Neither one of them would own the house that he lived in until his entire career was over. Truman lived and died probably the poorest of twentieth-century presidents, certainly the poorest of the last fifty years. Eisenhower, in spite of book sales and rich friends, would not be among the richest.

"Both married 'above themselves' and had lifelong marriages. Harry Truman displayed a spectacular devotion to Bess Wallace from the time he met her in the Presbyterian Sunday school when he was six until he died at eighty-eight. Through twenty-nine years of courtship and fifty-three years of marriage, he was faithful, apparently, despite life in the army in France, innumerable road trips as a traveling politician, regular attendance at American Legion conventions, and months of living alone in Washington, eating in Hot Shoppes, while Bess and Margaret went back to Independence. Dwight Eisenhower kept his marriage together through twenty-five years in the military camps of a peacetime army, seventeen different places of residence, a radical four-year wartime separation while he lived on another continent from his wife and became famous, as well as the focus of gossip because of his relationship with his driver, Kay Summersby, and then through twenty-four more years of fame, power, and retirement.

"Both men had a straightforward, uncomplicated patriotism. The chief living moral model for both of them would be the same man: George Marshall. Truman chose him instead of the slippery Franklin Roosevelt; Eisenhower preferred him to the flamboyant Douglas MacArthur.

"Although members of the Lost Generation, neither of them was lost. Although members of their generation engaged in the 'revolt from the village' after the Great War and lived in Paris, neither of these villagers revolted. Neither went to Paris, or to anywhere else in Europe, except when sent there by the army."

delanceyplace.com 5/17/12 - the mansions of kings and queens

Fri, 18 May 2012 03:22:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - the mansions and retinues of such kings and queens as Britain's King Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth:

"Traditionally, the great house builders (and house accumulators) were monarchs. At the time of his death Henry VIII had no fewer than forty-two palaces. But his daughter Elizabeth cannily saw that it was much cheaper to visit others and let them absorb the costs of her travels, so she resurrected in a big way the venerable practice of making annual royal progresses [lengthy visits to the houses of nobles]. The queen was not in truth a great traveler-she never left England or even ventured very far within it-but she was a terrific visitor. Her annual progresses lasted eight to twelve weeks and took in about two dozen houses.

"Royal progresses were nearly always greeted with a mixture of excitement and dread by those on whom the monarch called. On the one hand they provided unrivaled opportunities for preferment and social advancement, but on the other they were stupefyingly expensive. The royal household numbered up to about 1,500 people, and a good many of these-150 or so in the case of Elizabeth I-traveled with the royal personage on her annual pilgrimages. Hosts not only had the towering expenditure of feeding, housing, and entertaining an army of spoiled and privileged people but also could expect to experience quite a lot of pilfering and property damage, as well as some less salubrious surprises. After the court of Charles II departed from Oxford in about 1660, one of those left behind remarked in an understandably appalled tone how the royal visitors had left 'their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars.'

"Since a successful royal visit could pay big dividends, most hosts labored inventively and painstakingly to please the royal guest. Owners learned to provide elaborate masques and pageants as a very minimum, but many built boating lakes, added wings, or reconstructed whole landscapes in the hope of eliciting a small cry of pleasure from the royal lips. Gifts were lavished freely. A hapless courtier named Sir John Puckering gave Elizabeth a diamond-festooned silk fan, several loose jewels, a gown of rare splendor, and a pair of exceptionally fine virginals, then watched at their first dinner as Her Majesty admired the silver cutlery and a salt cellar and, without a word, dropped them into the royal handbag.

"Even her most long-standing ministers learned to be hypersensitive to the queen's pleasures. When Elizabeth complained of the distance to his country house in Lincolnshire, Lord Burghley bought and extended another at Waltham Cross, in London's Home Counties. Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth's lord chancellor, built a mighty edifice called Holdenby House expressly for receiving the queen. In the event, she never came, and Hatton died £18,000 in debt-a crushing burden, equivalent to about £9 million today.

"Sometimes the builders of these houses didn't have a great deal of choice. James I ordered the loyal but inconsequential Sir Francis Fane to rebuild Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire on a colossal scale so that he and the Duke of Buckingham, his lover, would have some rooms of suitable grandeur to saunter through en route to the bedroom.

"The worst imposition of all was to be instructed to take on some costly, long-standing obligation to the crown. Such was the fate of Bess of Hardwick's husband, the sixth Lord Shrewsbury. For sixteen years he was required to act as jailer to Mary, Queen of Scots, which in effect meant maintaining the court of a small, fantastically disloyal state in his own home. We can only imagine his sinking heart as he saw a line of eighty horse-drawn wagons-enough to make a procession a third of a mile long-coming up his drive bearing the Scottish queen, fifty servants and secretaries, and all their possessions. In addition to housing and feeding this force of people, Shrewsbury had to maintain a private army to provide security."

delanceyplace.com 5/16/12 - jimi hendrix gets his first electric guitar

Wed, 16 May 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - living in near penniless poverty with his alcoholic father Al in Seattle, with his mother long since having left them both and his brother Leon in foster care, sixteen-year-old Jimi Hendrix got his first electric guitar:

"Jimi turned sixteen [in the fall of 1958], and music became an increasingly important part of his life. He had become proficient on his acoustic guitar, but what he most wanted was an electric model. 'He was fascinated with electronics,' Leon recalled. 'He had rewired a stereo and tried to make it electrify his guitar.' [Family friend] Ernestine Benson, seeing Jimi's interest in music grow, hounded Al to buy the boy a proper instrument.

"School continued to be a problem. Even retaking classes he had failed the previous year, Jimi struggled. When he and Al moved again in December to live for a few months with [his niece] Grace and [her husband] Frank Hatcher, it necessitated yet another transfer to Washington junior High. When the spring term was over, Jimi had again failed math, English, and mechanical drawing. He couldn't be held back a second time, so school officials approved him for high school in the fall, hoping, no doubt, that the new environment would improve his grades.

"Father and son spent only a short time living with the Hatchers, who quickly tired of Al's troubles. 'Al was so inconsistent: drinking, gambling, and coming home any old time,' Frank Hatcher recalled. In April 1959, they moved again, this time to an apartment on First Hill. The building was so rodent-infested, Al never bothered to turn the gas stove on or to use the kitchen. Prostitutes worked down the street. The apartment was across from a juvenile detention center, which perhaps served as a reminder to Jimi of where things could lead.

"Despite the degradation around them, it was in that apartment where Jimi found his greatest childhood joy when he received his first electric guitar. Nagged constantly by Ernestine Benson to 'get that boy a guitar,' Al finally relented and bought an instrument on time payments from Myer's Music. He purchased a saxophone at the same time, thinking he would take the instrument up himself. For a brief while, the two Hendrix males jammed together. When the next payment came due, however, Al returned the horn.

"Jimi's guitar was a white Supro Ozark. It was right-handed, but Jimi immediately restrung it leftie; that still meant that the guitar's controls were reversed, which would have made it difficult to master. Jimi immediately called [girlfriend] Carmen Goudy and yelled into the phone, 'I've got a guitar!'

'You already have a guitar,' she said.

'No, I mean a real guitar!' he exclaimed. He dashed over to her house. As they walked to Meany Park, Jimi was literally jumping for joy with the guitar in his hands.

'Remember,' Carmen said, 'we were kids who were so poor, we didn't get stuff for Christmas. This was like having five Christmases all rolled up into one. You couldn't help but feel happy for him. I think it was the happiest day of his life.' "

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delanceyplace.com 5/15/12 - unconventional education

Tue, 15 May 2012 03:34:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - an unconventional approach to education:

"In 1999 the Indian physicist Sugata Mitra got interested in education. He knew there were places in the world without schools and places in the world where good teachers didn't want to teach. What could be done for kids living in those spots was his question. Self-directed learning was one possible solution, but were kids living in slums capable of all that much self-direction?

"At the time, Mitra was head of research and development for NIIT Technologies, a top computer software and development company in New Delhi, India. His posh twenty-first-century office abutted an urban slum but was kept separate by a tall brick wall. So Mitra designed a simple experiment. He cut a hole in the wall and installed a computer and a track pad, with the screen and the pad facing into the slum. He did it in such a way that theft was not a problem, then connected the computer to the Internet, added a web browser, and walked away.

"The kids who lived in the slums could not speak English, did not know how to use a computer, and had no knowledge of the Internet, but they were curious. Within minutes, they'd figured out how to point and click. By the end of the first day, they were surfing the web and-even more importantly-teaching one another how to surf the web. These results raised more questions than they answered. Were they real? Did these kids really teach themselves how to use this computer, or did someone, perhaps out of sight of Mitra's hidden video camera, explain the technology to them?

"So Mitra moved the experiment to the slums of Shivpuri, where, as he says, 'I'd been assured no one had ever taught anybody anything.' He got similar results. Then he moved it to a rural village and found the same thing. Since then, this experiment has been replicated all over India, and all over the world, and always with the same outcome: kids, working in small, unsupervised groups, and without any formal training, could learn to use computers very quickly and with a great degree of proficiency.

"This led Mitra to an ever-expanding series of experiments about what else kids could learn on their own. One of the more ambitious of these was conducted in the small village of Kalikkuppam in southern India. This time Mitra decided to see if a bunch of impoverished Tamil-speaking, twelve-year-olds could learn to use the Internet, which they'd never seen before; to teach themselves biotechnology, a subject they'd never heard of; in English, a language none of them spoke. 'All I did was tell them that there was some very difficult information on this computer, they probably wouldn't understand any of it, and I'll be back to test them on it in a few months.'

"Two months later, he returned and asked the students if they'd understood the material. A young girl raised her hand. 'Other than the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease,' she said, 'we've understood nothing.' In fact, this was not quite the case. When Mitra tested them, scores averaged around 30 percent. From 0 percent to 30 percent in two months with no formal instruction was a fairly remarkable result, but still not good enough to pass a standard exam. So Mitra brought in help. He recruited a slightly older girl from the village to serve as a tutor. She didn't know any biotechnology, but was told to use the 'grandmother method': just stand behind the kids and provide encouragement. 'Wow, that's cool, that's fantastic, show me something else!' Two months later, Mitra came back. This time, when tested, average scores had jumped to 50 percent, which was the same average as high-school kids studying bio-tech at the best schools in New Delhi.

"Next Mitra started refining the method. He began installing computer terminals in schools. Rather than giving students a broad subject to learn-for example, biotechnology-he started asking directed questions such as 'Was World War II good or bad?' The students could use every available resource to answer the question, but schools were asked to restrict the number of Internet portals to one per every four students because, as Matt Ridley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, 'one child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot.' When they were tested on the subject matter afterward (without use of the computer), the mean score was 76 percent. That's pretty impressive on its own, but the question arose as to the real depth of learning. So Mitra came back two months later, retested the students, and got the exact same results. This wasn't just deep learning, this was an unprecedented retention of information. ...

"Taken together, this work reverses a bevy of educational practices. Instead of top-down instruction, [these 'self-organized learning environments'] are bottom up. Instead of making students learn on their own, this work is collaborative. Instead of a formal in-school setting for instruction, the Hole-in-the-Wall method relies on a playground-like environment. Most importantly, minimally invasive education doesn't require teachers. Currently there's a projected global shortage of 18 million teachers over the next decade."

delanceyplace.com 5/14/12 - governors and fistfights

Mon, 14 May 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Huey P. Long. From his swearing-in as Louisiana governor in 1928 to his assassination in 1935, Huey Long was a firebrand without equal in American politics. Leaving a non-stop trail of vitriol and controversy in his wake, Long was not above a fist-fight with a former governor:

"It was lunchtime and a crowd of visitors attending a bottlers convention filled the plush lobby of New Orleans's Hotel Roosevelt. A group of Orange Crush salesmen were relaxing in the hotel grill after finishing their fried oyster sandwiches when they heard yells and scuffling outside the door. Rushing into the lobby, they were surprised to see an elderly overweight gentleman grappling with a younger man on the marble floor. Many of the onlookers recognized the two men fighting. The older gentleman was J. Y. Sanders, sixtyish and the former governor of the state, and the younger was the red-haired Huey P. Long.

"An old-fashioned Southern orator full of cliches about the Lost Cause and the virtues of white supremacy, Jared Y. Sanders was a household name in Louisiana politics. Supported by the New Orleans Ring, he served in the state House of Representatives from 1892 to 1904, as lieutenant governor from 1904 to 1908, governor from 1908 to 1912, and U.S. congressman from Louisiana's Sixth District from 1917 to 1921. A fire-breathing Protestant who fought liquor and gambling, Sanders ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1912,1920, and 1926. While governor, Sanders accomplished little and succumbed to the conservative backroom politics of gentlemanly know-nothingness that kept Louisiana mired in the nineteenth century. His refusal to improve the state's archaic highways earned him the nickname 'Gravel Roads' Sanders.

"Huey claimed he had opposed Sanders in every election since 1908, including the 1926 Senate race when he campaigned across the state for incumbent Senator Ed Broussard and against that 'long-legged sap-sucker' Sanders. Sanders now was bent over by age, prompting Huey to call him 'Old Buzzard Back.' J.Y. detested Huey, writing that 'when it comes to arousing prejudice and passion, when it comes to ranting and raving, when it comes to vituperation and vilification, when it comes to denunciation and demagoguery, there is one who stands out by himself alone. [Huey] has many imitators but no equals.' Any meeting between the two men usually turned ugly.

"Ugly indeed was the scene on Tuesday, November 15, 1927, when Huey and Sanders clashed in the Hotel Roosevelt lobby. Huey had just arrived in New Orleans for a week of campaigning and headed to his headquarters on the hotel's twelfth floor. Unexpectedly he ran into J.Y, who was just leaving the dining room. When he spotted Huey, Sanders yelled across the marble-columned lobby that he was a 'damned liar.' Huey jumped on the ex-governor, punched him, and turned and ran to the elevator at the other end of the hotel. Sanders, portly and puffing and bent over with age, chased Huey to the elevator and squeezed in before the doors shut. The two men wrestled on the floor as the boy operating the elevator watched in stunned silence. Bystanders broke up the scuffle.

"Neither man was injured and both claimed victory. J.Y. declared that Huey crouched in the elevator like a 'terror-stricken kitten' and Huey's opponents branded him as a coward who fled from the sixty-year-old ex-governor. Later that afternoon Huey strutted through the lobby viciously chewing on a six-inch cigar and flaunting a part of J.Y.'s shirt cuff ripped off in the elevator. That evening, he still waved J.Y.'s torn cuff and bragged of his elevator triumph as he spoke to a huge crowd in Palmer Park on Carrollton Avenue."

delanceyplace.com 5/11/12 - uncle ho's tomb

Fri, 11 May 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - after almost a millennium as an independent kingdom, in the 1800s Vietnam (French Indochina) became a French colony and its people suffered under the colonial lash. It was then occupied by Japan during World War II, and sensing an opportunity upon the end of the war, Vietnam declared its independence from France under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Vietnam's independence was brief, however, as the French ignored Vietnam's declaration and reasserted their rights to the colony. It took three wars of independence -- first against the French, then against the U.S., and finally against the Chinese -- before the country finally regained genuine independence. "Uncle" Ho became revered in Vietnam as fervently as George Washington was after the American Revolution, and today his body is viewed by thousands each day in an imposing mausoleum in the heart of now-capitalist Hanoi:

"Born Nguyen Sinh Cung on May 19, 1890, in the village of Hoang Tru near Vinh, just north of Hue in central Vietnam, Ho [Chi Minh] spent his young life looking over his father's shoulder as [he] studied to be a mandarin (high government official). While living in Hue, he saw his mother and sister die -- experiences that steeled him for a harsh life later. Ho's father was a thinker and had many friends who were active in radical politics, and from an early age Ho was exposed to lots of revolutionary talk [against the French]. Ho studied only briefly at university before setting out on his own, walking the length of Vietnam and working as a teacher here and there from 1906 to 1911. ... Like Che Guevara's motorcycle trip around South America, Ho Chi Minh's formative wanderings in Vietnam were a major part of his identity. He developed his compassion and understanding of the Vietnamese people and also saw up close their struggles under a colonial yoke.

"Leaving Saigon in 1911, Ho set sail as a cook on a ship. Reputedly, this was the time when he gained his worldly perspective and began to understand notions of the world as a class struggle, a kind of Darwinian fight that can have only one solution: an ongoing peasant/proletariat revolution. He connected with other free thinkers abroad, working in kitchens in London, and then moved to Paris, where he changed his name to Nguyen Ai Quoc ('Nguyen the Patriot'). His ideas began to gain clout among fellow dissidents, and he became involved in underground print journalism while building a Rolodex of fellow revolutionaries.

"He traveled between Moscow and China, a revolutionary peripatetic, for most of the 1930s, and grew a large following. As a founder of the Indochinese Communist Party, he was under constant suspicion and surveillance, at one point fleeing to Hong Kong and then on to the south of China, where he formed the League for an Independent Vietnam, whose members, later soldiers, were called the Viet Minh, and then Viet Cong in the war with the United States. Imprisoned by Chiang Kai-shek in 1940, Ho changed his name to Ho Chi Minh ('Enlightened One') and returned to Vietnam via surreptitious border crossings and long stays in hide-out caves in the far north (near Cao Bang).

"On August 19, 1945, after the surrender of the Japanese in World War II, Ho Chi Minh made his 'Declaration of Independence' that borrowed language from U.S. and French documents of freedom. Thus began the armed revolution. Outwardly an ascetic, Ho was reputedly a ladies' man, and stories of his nighttime dalliances, real or imagined, pepper more recent histories. He is even said to have taken up with a French woman and to have fathered a number of children. Diminutive and delicate, Ho was a leader who lived a spartan existence, upholding the ideals of egalitarian revolution, living in a simple two-room building on the grounds of the former imperial palace.

"Ho Chi Minh died from natural causes in 1969, just 6 years short of seeing his dream of a unified Communist Vietnam. Nearing death, Ho was explicit about his wishes to be cremated, his ashes divided into three separate portions and distributed at sites in the north, center, and south to celebrate the reunification of the country. He asked for no pomp or circumstance, no grand tomb or homage to his remains. The hulking mausoleum [is where he is now] embalmed and set on a palanquin for general public viewing. ...

"Following a long tradition of deifying war heroes, Ho Chi Minh's image is everywhere [in Vietnam]: on cabs, in shrines, and in long rows of portraits hung in family rooms, sanctified in the family pantheon as one of the great immortals."

delanceyplace.com 5/10/12 - how to act

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:22:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - Michael Caine, the Oscar-winning veteran of over one hundred feature films, has a reputation for professionalism and exhaustive preparation - all, he claims, so that he can overcome his natural fear and tension and come across as natural in his work. In fact, he goes so far as to describe relaxation as key for great acting. Here he contrasts theater acting with movie acting:

"If you catch somebody 'acting' in a movie, that actor is doing it wrong. ... In the early talkies, actors came to the movies from a theatre tradition and, not surprisingly, they performed in a way that was designed for the theatre. ... If an actor had to cry in a scene, he'd launch into a big emotional number to show the audience his grief. He would probably base his performance on what he'd seen other actors doing in acclaimed performances. Whether that method was effective or not, it was the tradition of the times. ...

"The modern film actor knows that real people in real life struggle not to show their feelings. It is more truthful, and more potent, to fight against the tears, only yielding after all those defense mechanisms are exhausted. If today's actor emulates film, he'd be better off watching a documentary. The same is true of drunkenness. In real life, a drunk makes a huge effort to appear sober. ...

"Marlon Brando's work in On the Waterfront was so relaxed and underplayed, it became a milestone in the development of film acting. Over the years, the modern cinema audience has been educated to watch for and catch the minute signals that an actor conveys. By wielding the subtlest bit of body language, the actor can produce an enormously powerful gesture on the screen. ...

"The close-up is the shot on which film relies most when it comes to transmitting the subtleties of emotion and thought. It can give an actor tremendous power, but that potential energy requires enormous concentration to be realized. The close-up camera won't mysteriously transform a drab moment into something spectacular unless the actor has found something spectacular in the moment. In fact it will do just the opposite: the close-up camera will seek out the tiniest uncertainty and magnify it. 'Drying' (forgetting your lines) can be covered up on stage, where the actor is perhaps twenty feet from the front row of the audience; but the camera will betray the smallest unscheduled hesitation. If a member of the crew walks across my eye-line, off camera, when I'm doing a close-up, I immediately ask for a retake. I may not have thought my concentration lapsed-the director may assure me everything is fine-but the camera will have caught that minute flicker at the back of my eyes. ...

"The scale of a film performance may be smaller than that of a performance in the theatre, but the intensity is just as great. Perhaps greater. On stage you have the dramatic thrust of the whole play to help you along. In film you shoot isolated moments, probably in the wrong sequence, and you have to constantly crank yourself up to an intense pitch of concentration on every shot. There isn't any coasting along in films; your brain is basically working double time or you don't exist on the screen. And you would be surprised how large a 'small' performance can be on film, provided it is rooted in naturalism.

"I sometimes encounter actors who think they're going to steal a scene by being big and bombastic. Those actors are using their bodies and voices instead of their brains. They don't realize that in terms of voice and action, less is more....

"On stage, you have to project your voice or the words will sink without a trace into the third row of seats. On stage, the basic premise is action; you have to sell your attitudes to the audience. In movies, the microphone can always hear you, no matter how softly you speak, no matter where the scene is taking place. In movies, it is reaction that gives every moment its potency. That's why listening in films is so important, as well as the use of the eyes in the close-up. You don't have to shout and scream. You don't ever have to do it big."

delanceyplace.com 5/9/12 - a date with hitler

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1933, William Dodd, the new American ambassador to Germany, had the difficult task of assessing the new German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Dodd was accompanied during his tenure by his wife Mattie and his grown children, Bill and Martha. At one point, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, Hitler's foreign press chief, arranged for Dodd's daughter Martha to have a lunch date with Hitler knowing that Hitler's previous relationships with women had been odd and under the belief that Hitler "would be a much more reasonable leader if only he fell in love":

"On the morning of the rendezvous that Putzi Hanfstaengl had arranged for Martha with Hitler, she dressed carefully, seeing as she had been 'appointed to change the history of Europe.' To her it seemed a lark of the first order. She was curious to meet this man she once had dismissed as a clown but whom she now was convinced was 'a glamorous and brilliant personality who must have great power and charm.' She decided to wear her 'most demure and intriguing best,' nothing too striking or revealing, for the Nazi ideal was a woman who wore little makeup, tended her man, and bore as many children as possible. German men, she wrote, 'want their women to be seen and not heard, and then seen only as appendages of the splendid male they accompany.' She considered wearing a veil. ...

"Hanfstaengl had arranged that he and Martha would be joined for lunch by another party, a Polish tenor, Jan Kiepura, thirty-one years old. Hanfstaengl, well known and unmistakable, was treated with deference by the restaurant's staff. Once seated, Martha and the two men chatted over tea and waited. In time a commotion arose at the entrance to the dining room, and soon came the inevitable rumble of chairs shoved back and shouts of 'Heil Hitler.'

"Hitler and his party—including, indeed, his chauffeur—took seats at an adjacent table. First, Kiepura was ushered to Hitler's side. The two spoke about music. Hitler seemed unaware that Kiepura under Nazi law was classified as Jewish, by maternal heritage. A few moments later Hanfstaengl came over and bent low to Hitler's ear. He barreled back to Martha with the news that Hitler would now see her.

"She walked to Hitler's table and stood there a moment as Hitler rose to greet her. He took her hand and kissed it and spoke a few quiet words in German. She got a close look at him now: 'a weak, soft face, with pouches under the eyes, full lips and very little bony facial structure.' At this vantage, she wrote, the mustache 'didn't seem as ridiculous as it appeared in pictures—in fact, I scarcely noticed it.' What she did notice were his eyes. She had heard elsewhere that there was something piercing and intense about his gaze, and now, immediately, she understood. 'Hitler's eyes,' she wrote, 'were startling and unforgettable—they seemed pale blue in color, were intense, unwavering, hypnotic.'

"Yet his manner was gentle—'excessively gentle,' she wrote—more that of a shy teenager than an iron dictator. 'Unobtrusive, communicative, informal, he had a certain quiet charm, almost a tenderness of speech and glance,' she wrote. Hitler now turned back to the tenor and with what seemed to be real interest rekindled their conversation about music.

"He 'seemed modest, middle class, rather dull and self-conscious—yet with this strange tenderness and appealing helplessness,' Martha wrote. 'It was hard to believe that this man was one of the most powerful men in Europe.' Martha and Hitler shook hands once again, and for the second time he kissed hers. She returned to her table and to Hanfstaengl. They remained a while longer, over tea, eavesdropping on the continuing conversation between Kiepura and Hitler. Now and then Hitler would look her way, with what she judged to be 'curious, embarrassed stares.'

"That night, over dinner, she told her parents all about the day's encounter and how charming and peaceful the Fuhrer had been. Dodd was amused and conceded 'that Hitler was not an unattractive man personally.' "

delanceyplace.com 5/8/12 - the stallion sacrifice

Tue, 08 May 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - during the reign of the Gupta kings over northern India, King Samudragupta symbolically asserted his authority by reintroducing the astonishing ritual of the stallion sacrifice:

"A degree of stability returned to northern India with the establishment of the Gupta dynasty, which lasted from 320 AD to roughly 550 AD. Its second king, Samudragupta, undertook a whole series of campaigns, eliminating small kingdoms that had emerged during the rundown of Kushana rule and he extended his dominion into the upper reaches of the Indus, and some distance beyond, a feat of Indian arms unequalled since the reign of Asoka. The Guptas seem deliberately to have imitated the Mauryans, with one notable exception: they were staunch supporters of the Hindu gods. To demonstrate his control of 'all between the oceans' Samudragupta staged an Aryan horse sacrifice.

"The rite was a perfect way for Samudragupta to demonstrate the extent of his authority, since it descended from a practice in remote times when a chieftain asserted his ownership of herds and the grounds on which they grazed. When such an early ruler wished to announce himself as a paramount chief, he would do so by letting loose his best stallion. This splendid animal was allowed to wander wherever it liked, followed by a guard of young warriors, ready to defeat anyone who might attempt to capture the horse. The Gupta king's horse sacrifice included such a yearlong roam as well as rituals designed to purify both the horse and the ruler.

"Before setting the horse free, the prospective victim was washed in a pool while a dog was killed and thrown in the water. Then the Gupta warriors accompanying the stallion made sure that there was no contact with mares, or further immersion in rivers or streams, during the year it wandered the world. Towards the end of the year a huge pyre was erected, and Samudragupta underwent several observances in readiness for the sacrifice, which lasted three days. On the second day, when the actual slaughter took place, the king drove in a war chariot drawn by the sacrificial stallion and the other horses. The victim was anointed by Samudragupta's three foremost wives, and its tail decorated with pearls. At the sacrifice of the horse, a sheep and a goat were also killed. The stallion was then smothered to death, presumably to avoid damaging its body, whereupon the king's first wife, his queen, symbolically coupled with the sacrificed horse under covers, while the royal court gave her encouragement with obscene remarks. Afterwards, the victim was dismembered and burned on the pyre."

delanceyplace.com 5/7/12 - "employees are stupid"

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:04:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - mass production. To build cars cheaply enough for the average person to buy, Henry Ford had to redesign the assembly line according to the dictates of Frederick Taylor, breaking down each task task into its simplest components so that each worker was responsible for a single task that could be repeated all day with a minimum of wasted motion and time. This proved so dehumanizing that turnover skyrocketed to 350 percent. To counteract this, Ford doubled his wages. This paradox of rote work and high wages ushered in the beginnings of the great American urban middle class:

"The central challenge confronting the automobile industry was economic as well as technological: how to build an automobile inexpensive enough so that people other than the wealthy could buy it. The man who most successfully tackled this problem was Henry Ford, a former machinist and mechanical engineer from Michigan, who built his first automobile in 1896 and in 1903 founded the Ford Motor Company. ...

"Ford achieved this success by improving the techniques of mass production, putting into practice what he called 'the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, and speed.' Particularly in the pioneering plant he opened in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1910, he invested heavily in highly specialized machinery while simultaneously subdividing labor on the shop floor. To further the goals of continuity and speed, Ford in 1913 adopted the moving assembly line, a network of conveyor belts and overhead chains that carried all pieces of the automobile from one worker to the next. 'Every piece of work in the shop moves,' Ford observed a few years later. 'There is no lifting or trucking of anything other than materials.' The moving assembly line produced substantial savings, in part because employees were compelled to work more intensively, at a pre-set rhythm. Within a decade, the moving assembly line was adopted throughout the industry, hastening the disappearance of small manufacturers who could not afford to retool their plants.

"Ford's assembly line and his production techniques in general were exemplars of 'scientific management,' a phrase and approach made popular by Philadelphia engineer and businessman Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor was one of the nation's first specialists in shop-floor management, and his short book The Principles of Scientific Management was the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor believed that workplaces could be made more efficient by training, inducing, and compelling workers to labor more steadily and intensively. He conducted time and motion studies to analyze the tasks workers were expected to perform and then encouraged employers to reorganize the work process to minimize wasted motion and time. He also favored piece-rate payment schemes to compel employees, many of whom he described as 'stupid,' to work more quickly. 'Faster work can be assured,' wrote Taylor, 'only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements... and enforced cooperation.'

"Not surprisingly, most industrial workers resisted such schemes. One worker at the Ford Motor Company complained that 'when the whistle blows he starts to jerk and when the whistle blows again he stops jerking.' At Ford and elsewhere, a common response to the brutal intensification of work was absenteeism and high quit rates: in 1913, Ford's daily absentee rate was 10 percent, while annual turnover exceeded 350 percent. To reduce turnover, which was costly to the company, Ford doubled the daily wages of his most valued employees, to five dollars a day. This strategy was successful in stabilizing the labor force and reducing operating costs."

delanceyplace.com 5/4/12 - comparing grant and macarthur

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:26:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Ulysses Grant was general who led the North to victory in the American Civil War. Often a failure at his small business endeavors before the war, he was plain-spoken, modest and unassuming as a general. When he arrived in Washington from the West to assume his duties as head of the army in a rumpled, dirty private's uniform, he was not recognized until he signed his name at the guest register of the Willard Hotel. His autobiography - dictated from his death-bed to Samuel Clemens as a way to raise money for his again-impoverished family - is now regarded as one of the classics of American literature. Douglas MacArthur was one of the most controversial generals in American history. Revered and deified by many, he is most remembered for his generalship during the Korean War and in the Pacific Theater of World War II. But he was egotistical in the extreme, adopting the full decor of generalship and more - and as many reviled him as deified him, especially for what they viewed as the unnecessary aggression and blunders of Korea. Like Grant, he wrote an autobiography:

"Like many of the great captains he strove to emulate, Douglas MacArthur loved to read history. Starting with books collected by his father, he had amassed a personal library of 7,000 to 8,000 volumes by the late 1930s. He was particularly keen on the lives of military officers. His second wife, Jean Faircloth, fed this appetite with Christmas presents that included biographies of such notable generals as Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jonathan 'Stonewall' Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. MacArthur read avidly, sometimes consuming three books in a day.

"He laced his public speeches with historical references and used them in conversation with a frequency that intimidated visitors and acquaintances alike. Late in life, MacArthur wrote his own history in the form of autobiography. In recording his 'participation in our great struggles for national existence, human liberty, and political equality,' he confessed (in a line that must have evoked a smile from readers who knew him) that his 'greatest difficulty' lay in 'recounting my share in the many vital events involved without giving my acts an unwarranted prominence.'

"In character and implications, MacArthur's Reminiscences differed sharply from Grant's Memoirs. Grant's narrative gathered power from the forward movement of simple, direct statements; MacArthur constructed his as a leisurely and orotund scrapbook of personal memories, supported by excerpts from letters and speeches. Readers have judged Grant equally brilliant as memoirist and general because he reported with such clarity the decisions he made and the actions he took and then assessed with such candor the consequences of those acts, for his men, his mission, and himself.

"By contrast, MacArthur never passed up an opportunity to instruct the reader on the importance of the things he had accomplished, unless he could quote other authorities to the same effect. Above all, Grant conveyed the drama and tragedy of the Civil War while doing justice to the ambiguities of its origins and outcomes. MacArthur, on the other hand, concentrated on conveying the excitement and nobility of wars about which he felt no ambivalence at all: wars fought in the defense of freedom, democracy, and Christianity, conducted by officers whose devotion to duty, honor, and country offered a motive sufficient to justify the sacrifice of their own lives, and the lives of the soldiers they led."

delanceyplace.com 5/3/12 - the reason we have a minimum age for the presidency

Thu, 03 May 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - the United States Constitution established a minimum age of thirty-five years to be eligible to be president in part because the Founders sought to prevent the presidency from becoming a hereditary position:

From Article II, Section I of the United States constitution: No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

"The phrase 'at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution' was added to protect the rights of would-be presidents [born outside the United States] who had proven their loyalty during the Revolution. Of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution, seven were born in foreign lands, including Alexander Hamilton (the West Indies), Robert Morris (England), James Wilson (Scotland), and Pierce Butler, Thomas Fitzsimmons, William Paterson, and James McHenry (all Ireland). Edward Corwin has observed that Wilson, who served on the Committee of Detail, 'seems to have felt the need of such a clause in his own behalf especially keenly.'

"Nearly a quarter of the signers of the Constitution, including Hamilton, hadn't yet reached the age of thirty-five. This age requirement, Yale's Akhil Amar has suggested, was intended to prevent the presidency from becoming a hereditary position. A relatively high age minimum would diminish the likelihood that a sitting or ex-president would possess an eligible heir to run for the office. A nineteen-year-old favorite son might die before he could seek election at the age of thirty-five. 'In the course of nature very few fathers leave a son who has arrived to that age,' is what A Native of Virginia had to say in the 'Observations Upon the Proposed Plan of Federal Government' of 1788.

"The first son of a president to be elected president was John Quincy Adams, who was in his fifties. It is difficult to overstate how concerned some of the founders were that the executive branch would come under the control of a single family, and that the Republican experiment would devolve into a monarchy. In a part of the draft of his First Inaugural Address that wasn't included in the final speech, Washington dwelled on the fact that he was childless: 'I have no child for whom I could wish to make a provision—no family to build in greatness upon my Country's ruins.' In one passage in 14 Federal Farmer, arguing against permitting a presidency of more than a single term, the anonymous anti-Federalist underscores these concerns: 'When a man shall get the chair, who may be re-elected, from time to time, for life, his greatest object will be to keep it; to gain friends and votes, at any rate; to associate some favourite son with himself, to take the office after him: whenever he shall have any prospect of continuing the office in himself and family, he will spare no artifice, no address, and no exertions, to increase the powers and importance of it.' The Federalist Farmer argued that a man should not be 'eligible till he arrive to the age of forty or forty-five years.' "

delanceyplace.com 5/2/12 - the zeal of leo tolstoy

Wed, 02 May 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian aristocrat who joined the army out of disillusionment with his life. He fought in the Crimean War, and the demeaning treatment of soldiers he observed led him to become a reformist, and he repudiated his lifestyle of gambling, whoring and feasting. He eventually adopted a simple peasant's lifestyle and became a zealous reformer. His novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina are viewed as two of the greatest written, and his ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, profoundly influenced Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.:

In March 1854 a young artillery officer by the name of Leo Tolstoy arrived at the headquarters of General Mikhail Gorchakov. He had joined the army in 1852, the year he had first come to the attention of he literary world with the publication of his memoir Childhood in the literary journal the Contemporary, the most important monthly periodical in Russia at that time. Dissatisfied with his frivolous way of life as an aristocrat in St. Petersburg and Moscow, he had decided to make a fresh start by following his brother Nikolai to the Caucasus when he returned from leave to his army unit there. Tolstoy was attached to an artillery brigade in the Cossack village of Starogladskaya in the northern Caucasus. ...

"Aristocratic connections went a long way in the Russian army staff. Tolstoy was quickly caught up in the social whirl of Bucharest, attending dinners at the Prince's house, games of cards and musical soirees in drawing rooms, evenings at the Italian opera and French theatre - a world apart from the bloody battlefields of the Danubian front just a few miles away. 'While you are imagining me exposed to all the dangers of war, I have not yet smelt Turkish powder, but am very quietly at Bucharest, strolling about, making music, and eating ice-creams,' he wrote to his aunt at the start of May ...

"[Year's later after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War] one of the voices calling for reform belonged to Tolstoy, whose Sevastopol Sketches had catapulted him to literary fame. Tolstoy's experience of the Crimean War shaped his ideas on life and literature. He had witnessed at first hand the incompetence and corruption of many officers, and their often brutal treatment of the ordinary soldiers and sailors, whose courage and resilience had inspired him. It was in his diary of the campaign that he first developed his ideas for radical reform and vowed to fight injustice with his pen. On his way from Odessa to Sevastopol in November 1854, he was told by the pilot his boat about the transport of the soldiers: 'how a soldier lay down in the pouring rain on the wet bottom of the boat and fell asleep; how an officer beat a soldier for scratching himself; and how a soldier shot himself during the crossing for fear of having overstayed his leave by two days and how he was thrown overboard without burial.' The contrast with the way he thought the ordinary soldier was treated in the Western armies brought home the need for change. ...

"Tolstoy's experience in the Crimean War had led him to question more than just the military system. The poet Afanasy Fet, who first met Tolstoy in Turgenev's St. Petersburg apartment in the winter of 1855, was struck by the young man's 'automatic opposition to all generally accepted opinions'. Living side by side with the ordinary soldiers in the Crimea had opened Tolstoy's eyes to the simple virtues of the peasantry; it had set him on a restless search for a new truth, for a way to live morally as a Russian nobleman and landowner, given the injustices of serfdom. He had touched on these matters before A Landowner's Morning (1852), he wrote about a landowner (for which read: Tolstoy) who seeks a life of happiness and justice in the country and learns that it can only be found in constant labour for the good of others less happy than himself. At around the same time, he had proposed to reduce the dues of the serfs on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, but the serfs were suspicious of his intentions (they were not accustomed to such benevolence) and had turned his offer down. But it was only in the Crimea that Tolstoy began to feel a close attachment to the serfs in uniform - those 'simple and kind men, whose goodness is apparent during a real war'. He was disgusted with his former life - the gambling, the whoring, the excessive feasting and drinking, the embarrassment of riches, and the lack of any real work or purpose in his life. And after the war, he threw himself into the task of living with the peasants in 'a life of truth' with new determination."

delanceyplace.com 5/1/12 - modern tomatoes

Tue, 01 May 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - most of the tomatoes we buy at supermarkets are a far cry from the sweet, tart, flavorful tomatoes that we grow in gardens or that were plentiful in stores decades ago:

"Although tomatoes are farmed commercially in about twenty states, Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than one billion pounds to the United States, Canada, and other countries every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial-scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy-red skin tones of a ripe tomato.

"Beauty, in this case, is only skin deep. According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless commercially grown fresh tomatoes in 2009, our second most popular vegetable behind lettuce. We buy winter tomatoes, but that doesn't mean we like them. In survey after survey, fresh tomatoes fall at or near the bottom in rankings of consumer satisfaction. No one will ever be able to duplicate the flavor of garden-grown fruits and vegetables at the supermarket (or even the farmers' market), but there's a reason you don't hear consumers bemoaning the taste of supermarket cabbages, onions, or potatoes. Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida.

"Perhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today's industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less Vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium. ...

"If it were left up to the laws of botany and nature, Florida would be one of the last places in the world where tomatoes grow. Tomato production in the state has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with biology. Florida is warm when the rest of the East and Midwest, within easy striking distance for a laden produce truck,is cold. But Florida is notoriously humid. Tomatoes' wild ancestors came from the coastal deserts of northern Peru and southern Ecuador, some of the driest places on earth. Taken to Spain, Italy, and southern France in the 1500s, they thrived in the Mediterranean's sunny, rainless summers. They flourish in the dry heat of California, home to the U.S. canned tomato industry, which is completely distinct from the fresh-market tomato industry.

"Canning tomatoes and fresh tomatoes may as well be apples and oranges. When forced to struggle in the wilting humidity of Florida, tomatoes become vulnerable to all manner of fungal diseases. Hordes of voracious hoppers, beetles, and worms chomp on their roots, stems, leaves, and fruit. And although Florida's sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. Florida growers may as well be raising their plants in a sterile hydroponic medium. To get a successful crop, they pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness's arsenal. Workers are exposed to these chemicals on a daily basis. The toll includes eye and respiratory ailments, exposure to known carcinogens, and babies born with horrendous birth defects. Not all the chemicals stay behind in the fields once the tomatoes are harvested. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found residues of thirty-five pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarket produce sections."

delanceyplace.com 4/30/12 - paying for louisiana

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - very early in its national life, the United States had the opportunity to purchase a vast tract of land from Napoleon and France. Some consider it the greatest real estate deal in history. However, the U.S. didn't have the funds-the price was $15 million and the U.S. still had $82 million in unpaid war debts-and Napoleon needed cash for his wars, including his war with Britain. In an ironic development that reflected the claustrophobic and incestuous banking industry of the time, it was a British banker, Alexander Baring, who raised the funds for the America to pay Britain's archenemy Napoleon for the land:

"The second budget shock [for the U.S. after the expenditures needed to fight the Barbary pirates] was the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, probably the greatest real estate deal in history. Great for the U.S., that is, which doubled its size for a mere $15 million, about 4 cents an acre. Overnight, the upstart nation acquired land physically larger than France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, and the British Isles combined. Crowning the vast territory was the magnificent port city of New Orleans, which gave western farmers a much-needed water outlet to world markets. The country could now grow westward without fear that trans-Appalachian states would secede to gain cheap access to the sea.

"Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory because he was waging war with Britain and was strapped for cash. He wrongly believed the area a wasteland and hence strongly preferred to retain instead the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which occupied the western half of the island of Hispanola (the eastern half being the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo). Saint-Domingue boasted a population of 500,000 and plantations of sugar cane, indigo, coffee, and cocoa rich enough to fill 700 ships a year. The French then promptly lost the colony when, in 1804, a successful revolution by black slaves led to the in¬dependence of the new nation of Haiti.

"Jefferson was not certain, however, that the purchase was Constitutional. Re¬call that Jefferson interpreted the Constitution strictly, or at least publicly pur¬ported to do so. The Constitution made no specific provision for purchasing new territory, so Jefferson was inclined to believe that a Constitutional amend¬ment might have to be passed before the nation could take title to the territory. Madison and most other cabinet members were inclined to agree. [Secretary of the Treasury Albert] Gallatin, however, took a page from Hamilton and persuaded the president and the cabi¬net that the Constitution contained certain implied powers, including the in¬herent right to acquire territory. The movement to begin the lengthy process of amending the Constitution was dropped, and Congress quickly approved the purchase.

"Hamilton cast an even larger shadow over the proceedings because the Re¬publicans were about to start borrowing. To pay the purchase price and acquire good title, Gallatin had to pay Napoleon the full price in cash up front. As a dis¬tressed dictator desperate for cash, the little Corsican was not about to 'hold the mortgage.' And Gallatin had on hand only about one quarter of the cash needed to make the purchase. He therefore floated a bond issue through the Dutch banking house of Hope and Company, which promptly sold it to Baring Brothers, a British investment bank. Alexander Baring worked closely with Gal¬latin for five months in Washington to finalize the details. Although the two financiers formed a friendship, the price tag of the bond issue bothered Gal¬latin. He realized, however, that the port of New Orleans would increase federal revenues some $200,000 a year. Moreover, Gallatin and other Republicans must have savored the irony of British investors lending money to vastly in¬crease the power of their former colonies and to replenish the coffers of Britain's arch enemy, Napoleon Bonaparte."

delanceyplace.com 4/27/12 - mounds of ears and noses

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - through most of its long history, sandwiched between the perennially powerful China and Japan, Korea has been on the defensive, subject to invasions and intrigue from both countries, forced to be wary and distrustful, and surviving in part by playing one off against the other. Two such invasions were by Japan in the 1590s at a time when Korea was one of China's tributary states:

"Korea, caught between China and Japan, was often a battleground. Invasions from Japan led by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1592 and 1598 were among the most brutal ever, and are remembered by many Koreans today as the most devastating event in their difficult history. Japanese warriors sliced off enough ears and noses from enemy soldiers and civilians to create a huge mound with them near Kyoto, called the Mound of Ears (Mimizuka). The body parts were intended not only to inspire terror and serve as trophies of war but also to demonstrate samurai successes so that the warriors could be rewarded proportionally.

"These conflicts were among the first large-scale modern wars involving huge armies, advanced military technology, and massive casualties. The invasions were intended as a prelude to the conquest of China. Many Korean artisans were forcibly transferred to Japan, where they had a major impact on the development of Japanese ceramic and textile technologies and aesthetics.

"The Korean author Heo Gyun, who was over the course of his life a refugee, a diplo-mat, and a political dissident and reformer, was among those who fled from Hideyoshi's invaders. Heo, in his early twenties, was living in Seoul when the Japanese invaded. His young wife was pregnant. The Koreans were unprepared for the attack and offered little resistance.

"As Heo and his wife fled the city they saw it burning behind them-slaves had set fire to government offices to destroy the records that bound them. They were heading for his hometown of Gangneung on the east coast of Korea, far from the centers of fighting, where Heo's father was governor. The refugees were traveling through a rugged mountainous re¬gion during the heat of summer. When Heo's wife went into labor there was no opportunity to find sanitary conditions. She died in childbirth, and their newborn son also died a few days later. ...

"The Japanese advance began to stall. Though Korea's army was out¬matched, its navy-which had honed its skills defending the country against Japanese pirates-had success in disrupting the invaders' supply lines. As news of the invaders' brutality spread, impromptu militias rose up to supplement the inefficient and bureaucratic official military.

"China's Ming court viewed the impending defeat of its tributary state with alarm. In 1593 the Wanli emperor dispatched a large army to fight the Japanese. Fierce battles devastated the countryside, as the two super¬powers fought to stalemate. For several years an uneasy truce held while a negotiated settlement of the conflict was sought; then in 1597 the Japa¬nese launched another attack. This time the Koreans were better prepared. Inconclusive fighting continued until September 1598, when Hideyoshi died. On his deathbed he ordered the withdrawal of Japanese forces."

delanceyplace.com 4/26/12 - inappropriate grammar rules

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - certain grammatical "rules" that are widely viewed as correct come from the invalid application of grammatical rules from Classical Latin and Greek to the English language by British authors writing hundreds of years ago. Two such "rules"—which have been beautifully and routinely violated by writers from Shakespeare to Hemingway—are the prohibitions against split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition:

"The first prohibition against the split infinitive occurs in an 1834 article by an author identified only as 'P.' After that, increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, a 'rule' banning split infinitives began ricocheting from grammar book to grammar book, until every self-conscious English-speaker 'knew' that to put a word between 'to' and a verb in its infinitive was barbaric.

"The split-infinitive rule may represent mindless prescriptivism's greatest height. It was foreign. (It was almost certainty based on the inability to split infinitives in Latin and Greek, since they consist of one word only.) It had been routinely violated by the great writers in English; one 1931 study found split infinitives in English literature from every century, beginning with the fourteenth-century epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, through wrongdoers such as William Tyndale, Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others.

"Rewording split infinitives can introduce ambiguity: 'He failed entirely to comprehend it' can mean he failed entirely, or he comprehended, but not entirely. Only putting 'entirely' between 'to' and 'comprehend' can convey clearly 'he comprehended most, but not all.' True, sentences can be reworded to work around the problem ('He failed to comprehend everything'), but there is no reason to do so. While many prescriptive rules falsely claim to improve readability and clarity, this one is worse, introducing a problem that wasn't there in the first place. Yet as split infinitives in fact became more common in nineteenth-century writing, condemnations of it grew equally strongly. The idea that 'rules' were more important than history, elegance, or actual practice ... held writers and speakers in terror of making them. ...

"Why is it 'wrong' to end a sentence with a preposition? ... Who, upon seeing a cake in the office break room, says, 'For whom is this cake?' instead of 'Who's the cake for?' Where did this rule come from?

"The answer will surprise even most English teachers: John Dryden, the seventeenth-century poet less well known as an early, influential stickler. In a 1672 essay, he criticized his literary predecessor Ben Jonson for writing 'The bodies that these souls were frightened from.' Why the prepositional bee in Dryden's syntactical bonnet? This pseudo-rule probably springs from the same source many others do: the classical languages. Dryden said he liked to compose in Latin and translate into English, as he valued the precision and clarity he believed Latin required of writers. The preposition-final construction is impossible in Latin. Hence: it is impossible in English. Confused by his logic? Linguists remain so to this day. But once Dryden proclaimed the rule, it made its way into the first generation of English usage books roughly a century later and thence into the minds of two hundred years of English teachers and copy editors.

"The rule has no basis in clarity ('Who's that cake for?' is perfectly clear); history (it was made up from whole cloth); literary tradition (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Henry Adams, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and dozens of other great writers have violated it); or purity (it isn't native to English but probably stolen from Latin; clause-final prepositions exist in English's cousin languages such as Danish and Icelandic). Many people know that the Dryden rule is nonsense. From the great usage-book writer Henry Fowler in the early twentieth century, usage experts began to caution readers to ignore it. The New York Times flouts it. The 'rule' should be put to death, but it may never be. Even those who know it is ridiculous observe it for fear of annoying others."

delanceyplace.com 4/25/12 - the disappearing nuclear family

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1950, four million adult Americans lived alone. Today, thirty-one million do:

"In 1949, the Yale anthropologist George Peter Murdock published a survey of some 250 'representative cultures' from different eras and diverse parts of the world. He reported, 'The nuclear family is a universal human social grouping. Either as the sole prevailing form of the family or as the basic unit from which more complex familial forms are compounded, it exists as a distinct and strongly functional group in every known society. No exception, at least, has come to light.' ...

"During the past half century, our species has embarked on a remarkable social experiment. For the first time in human history, great numbers of people—at all ages, in all places, of every political persuasion—have begun settling down as singletons. Until recently, most of us married young and parted only at death. If death came early, we remarried quickly; if late, we moved in with family, or they with us. Now we marry later. (The Pew Research Center reports that the average age of first marriage for men and women is 'the highest ever recorded, having risen by roughly five years in the past half century.') We divorce, and stay single for years or decades. We survive our spouses, and do whatever we can to avoid moving in with others—even, perhaps especially, our children. We cycle in and out of different living arrangements: alone, together, together, alone. ...

"Numbers never tell the whole story, but in this case the statistics are startling. In 1950, 22 percent of American adults were single. Four million lived alone, and they accounted for 9 percent of all households. In those days, living alone was by far most common in the open, sprawling Western states—Alaska, Montana, and Nevada—that attracted migrant workingmen, and it was usually a short-lived stage on the road to a more conventional domestic life.

"Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million—roughly one out of every seven adults—live alone. (This figure excludes the 8 million Americans who live in voluntary and nonvoluntary group quarters, such as assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and prisons.) People who live alone make up 28 percent of all U.S. households, which means that they are now tied with childless couples as the most prominent residential type—more common than the nuclear family, the multigenerational family, and the roommate or group home. Surprisingly, living alone is also one of the most stable household arrangements. Over a five-year period, people who live alone are more likely to stay that way than everyone except married couples with children.

"Contemporary solo dwellers are primarily women: about 17 million, compared to 14 million men. The majority, more than 15 million, are middle-age adults between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-four. The elderly account for about 10 million of the total. Young adults between eighteen and thirty-four number more than 5 million, compared to 500,000 in 1950, making them the fastest-growing segment of the solo-dwelling population.

"Unlike their predecessors, people who live alone today cluster together in metropolitan areas and inhabit all regions of the country. The cities with the highest proportion of people living alone include Washington, D.C., Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and Miami. One million people live alone in New York City, and in Manhattan, more than half of all residences are one-person dwellings."

delanceyplace.com 4/24/12 - teamsters' president jimmy hoffa

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Jimmy Hoffa, the powerful General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union and reputed organized crime leader who for years was the bete noire of Bobby Kennedy, and who used the Teamsters' pension as an essentially personal fund to lend to the likes of President Richard Nixon and wildcatter Clint Murchison, Sr., father of Dallas Cowboys founding owner Clint Murchison, Jr.:

"James Riddle Hoffa ... was an unrestrained prole, short (five foot five), stumpy (180 pounds), and radiant with concentrated power. [In 1957] at forty-four, he was approaching maximum clout inside the labor movement. He still made it a point to wear off-the-rack suits and white wool sweat socks so that his counterparts from the business end of the trucking industry would make no mistake about his coal-mining origins. Like [previous Teamsters president] Dave Beck, he was a grade-school dropout. Unlike Beck, Hoffa betrayed little interest in strutting like a sultan around the Marble Palace, the luxurious new Teamster headquarters in D.C., or in limousines, or in expensive men's cologne.

"He made a unique impression. A dab of brilliantine was never able to restrain his short glossy black hair, so that feathers of it tended to stand up all around his scalp. His mood was normally a kind of caustic good humor, but should Hoffa become genuinely angry, as Paul Jacobs wrote, 'his gray-green eyes get incredibly cold and menacing. It's then that his ruthlessness, his obvious belief in physical violence as an instrument of power, shows through. ...'

"[When Hoffa was arrested] on charges of bribery and conspiracy, ... Robert Kennedy and Ethel contacted reporters before going down to the courthouse after midnight personally to watch Jimmy Hoffa get booked. 'He kept looking at me, his eyes full of disdain,' Kennedy reported to La Verne Duffy. Hoffa told Kennedy to run along home to bed. 'I'll take care of things, Bobby,' Hoffa assured Kennedy. 'Don't let's have any problems.' But Kennedy wouldn't leave, and after a few minutes Hoffa challenged Kennedy to a push-up contest. Hoffa could do fifty, one-handed. ...

"[In later Senate investigation hearings,] Kennedy would be pressing hard for how precisely Hoffa exploited ... a wide array of middle-level thugs to control the locals. But the squat, incisive Teamster chief was probably more concerned that Rackets Committee investigators be kept as far as possible from the ambitious loans his pension fund was contemplating. The Teamsters Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund, run out of Chicago, was already one of the great unpublicized honeypots in financial America. It had the virtue of remaining largely unsupervised. There were eight representatives of management and eight of labor in place as trustees, but Hoffa exerted such intimidating leverage that oversight was never contemplated. Approximately 60 percent of the assets were sunk in risky real estate ventures, entirely at the discretion of Hoffa and his cronies.

"Over the years, Teamster assets went out to underwrite everything from the million dollars Richard Nixon squeezed out of the Central States Fund to defray the costs of the Watergate cover-up to an estimated $300,000,000 [over $2 billion in today's dollars] plowed into Las Vegas by way of the Sunrise Hospital conglomerate and the Paradise Development Company. Having erected the main strip of casinos and hotels with Mormon money, the Mob shrewdly bought up enormous tracts of surrounding land with 6 percent notes from the Teamsters. Clint Murchison tapped Teamster assets to bankroll his more flamboyant wildcatting ventures."

delanceyplace.com 4/23/12 - honey, i forgot to duck

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:41:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1926, Philadelphia hosted a boxing match with the 120,000 spectators, a record attendance for a prizefight. Celebrities from Charlie Chaplin to William Randolph Hearst were in attendance. It was an effort to recoup losses from the financially disastrous Sesquicentennial celebrating the 150th anniversary of the founding of America:

"The Philadelphia Sesquicentennial celebrated the 150th anniversary of the founding of the nation in 1926. Built in South Philadelphia in the area now occupied by sports venues, the fair featured an eighty-foot-tall replica of the Liberty Bell covered with 26,000 lights. It rained on the day President Calvin Coolidge spoke at the opening ceremony in July, and it continued to rain throughout most of the rest of the fair. The weather and other factors led to financial difficulties, which some believe was the impetus for offering Sesquicentennial Stadium (later JFK Stadium) as the site of the Gene Tunney-Jack Dempsey heavyweight championship fight after plans to hold the fight at Madison Square Garden fell through.

"Dempsey was world champion, a boxer much loved by the rabid boxing fans of the 1920s. Known as the 'Manassa Mauler,' he gained his early reputation following several round-one knock-outs. Out of the ring for most of the three years preceding the fight, he had appeared in movies and on the vaudeville circuit. Dempsey's challenger, Gene Tunney, was known as an 'intellectual boxer,' not only for his interest in defense, but also because he read Shakespeare and quoted poetry. A Marine veteran, he competed in a series of fights to earn the title fight.

"Billed by promoters as 'the fight of the century,' the fight drew more than 120,000 spectators on this date in 1926, despite the pouring rain. Film stars such as Tom Mix and Charlie Chaplin, state governors, the mayors of Philadelphia and New York, financiers such as Andrew Mellon and Charles Schwab, and the publisher William Randolph Hearst contributed to the almost $2 million gate. It was a record attendance for a prize fight.

"Fans were largely disappointed in the fight itself. Dempsey seemed out of condition, slower, and less powerful than they remembered. The underdog Tunney made the most of his careful style, and he won the championship in a ten-round decision. Dempsey and his wife took the train back to the Midwest after the fight. At each train stop press conference, Mrs. Dempsey would ask, 'Jack, what happened?' Jack would always reply, 'Honey, I forgot to duck.' The quip was famously echoed by President Ronald Reagan many years later, in his reply to First Lady Nancy Reagan after he was shot by a would-be assassin."

delanceyplace.com 4/20/12 - the unifying purposes of america

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:32:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Jane Jacobs, the brilliant historical analyst and author whose work Death and Life of Great American Cities revolutionized urban planning, postulates that there have been four great central, unifying cultural purposes in American history. In succession, these have been independence, manifest destiny, reform, and—after the trauma of the Great Depression—full employment:

"In the founding period of the United States, a time when the Copernican, Newtonian, and Cartesian Enlightenment had succeeded both medievalism and the Renaissance, the cultural purpose became independence. Not for nothing was the charter of reasons behind the war of separation from Britain called the Declaration of Independence, and July Fourth called Independence Day. An accompanying cult developed around liberty, as symbolized by both the Liberty Bell and the aims of the French Revolution. Independence and liberty were succeeded by the related freedom, indeed by two conflicting versions of freedom: the political freedom of states' rights, offshoot of independence, and the social freedom of abolition of slavery, offshoot of liberty.

"In the decades after the Civil War, and the bloodletting that seemed briefly to resolve the conflict between concepts of freedom, there was no obvious American cultural consensus on the purpose of life, although there were contenders, such as the Manifest Destiny of America's push westward, which had already risen to its height in the 1840s with the Mexican War, the annexation of Texas, and the purchase of California and New Mexico. Manifest Destiny was extended at the turn of the century by President Theodore Roosevelt to the Caribbean and the Pacific with the Spanish-American War, which was taken by Americans to mean American rule over the Western Hemisphere.

"The start of the twentieth century and the decades immediately before and after were a time of reforming ferment as Americans sought to perfect their society by eliminating child labor, extending the vote to women, combating corruption and fraud, embracing public health measures and their enforcement, prohibiting the sale of alcohol, outlawing monopolies as restraints on trade, initiating environmental conservation through national parks (a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt's), improving working conditions and protecting the rights of labor, and pursuing many other practical reforms into which their proponents threw themselves with ardor as great as if each of these aims were indeed the purpose of life.

"The reforming spirit carried into the Great Depression years, with President Franklin Roosevelt's promotion of the Four Freedoms, linking economic aims (freedom from want) to human rights (freedom from fear) and his practical measures for making the links tangible, among them his successful advocacy of collective bargaining under the Robert F. Wagner proposals that became the National Labor Relations Act, and his institution of a regulatory Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), making rules for public corporations' disclosures and reining in speculative manipulations in corporate stocks. Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin's wife, for her part, channeled her lifelong experience with smallish reform movements into advocacy of the United Nations and, most notably, into that body's formulation and acceptance of a declaration of universal human rights, her chief legacy and monument. Among all these and other contenders for the American purpose of life, one seemed to win out, less with fanfare than with simple quiet acceptance: the American dream, the ideal that each generation of whites, whether immigrant or native-born, was to become more successful and prosperous than the parent generation. ...

"After the war was over, during the euphoria of victory and the minor booms of the Marshall Plan and the Korean War, a consensus formed and hardened across North America. If it had been voiced, it would have gone something like this: 'We can endure meaningful trials and overcome them. But never again—never, never—will we suffer the meaningless disaster of mass unemployment.' ...

"From the 1950s on, American culture's gloss on the purpose of life became assurance of full employment: jobs. Arguably, this has remained the American purpose of life, in spite of competition from the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and maybe even from the War on Terrorism, in which postwar reconstruction was linked with contracts for American companies and hence jobs for Americans."

delanceyplace.com 4/19/12 - the real cleopatra

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - although the Cleopatra of yore was portrayed primarily as a seductress, the real Cleopatra was a skilled naval commander, a published medical authority, and an expert royal administrator who was met with adulation throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and was perhaps even seen by some as a messianic figure, the hope for a future eastern Mediterranean free of Roman domination:

"Few personalities from classical antiquity are more familiar yet more poorly grasped than Cleopatra VII (69-30 B.C.), queen of Egypt. ... Cleopatra VII was an accomplished diplomat, naval commander, administrator, linguist, and author, who skillfully managed her kingdom in the face of a deteriorating political situation and increasing Roman involvement. That she ultimately lost does not diminish her abilities. ...

"Like all women, she suffers from male-dominated historiography in both ancient and modern times and was often seen merely as an appendage of the men in her life or was stereotyped into typical chauvinistic female roles such as seductress or sorceress, one whose primary accomplishment was ruining the men that she was involved with. In this view, she was nothing more than the 'Egyptian mate' of Antonius and played little role in the policy decisions of her own world. ...

"Yet she was the only woman in all classical antiquity to rule independently—not merely as a successor to a dead husband—and she desperately tried to salvage and keep alive a dying kingdom in the face of overwhelming Roman pressure. Descended from at least two companions of Alexander the Great, she had more stature than the Romans whom she opposed. ... Depicted evermore as the greatest of seductresses, who drove men to their doom, she had only two known relationships in 18 years, hardly a sign of promiscuity. Furthermore, these connections—to the two most important Romans of the period—demonstrated that her choice of partners was a carefully crafted state policy, the only way that she could ensure the procreation of successors who would be worthy of the distinguished history of her dynasty. ...

"Because there are no certain portraits of Cleopatra except the two dimensional shorthand on her coinage, little can be said about her physical appearance. The coins show a prominent nose (a family trait) and chin, with an intensity of gaze and hair inevitably drawn back into a bun. That she was short is explicitly stated in one source and perhaps implied in the famous bedsack tale. A notice by Plutarch is often misquoted to imply that she was not particularly beautiful, but what was actually written is that the force of her personality far outweighed any physical attractiveness. Sources agree that her charm was outstanding and her presence remarkable. ...

"[She was caught in a power struggle between Octavian (Augustus Caesar) and Antonius (Mark Antony)], and when protracted negotiations between Octavian and the couple failed to resolve anything, and in the summer of 30 B.C. Octavian invoked the military option, invading Egypt. Cleopatra, finding Antonius dispensable and hoping that she or her kingdom might survive without him, tricked him into suicide, but when she found that she herself was being saved to be exhibited in Octavian's triumph in Rome, she also killed herself. In August Of 30 B.C. the Ptolemaic kingdom came to an end. ...

"Some of the most familiar episodes of her career simply did not happen. She did not approach Caesar wrapped in a carpet, she was not a seductress, she did not use her charm to persuade the men in her life to lose their judgment, and she did not die by the bite of an asp."

delanceyplace.com 4/18/12 - debunking economics

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - economist Steve Keen is unsparing in his criticism of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and the currently dominant neo- classical school of economics. He maintains that Bernanke and his colleagues were sanguine and self-congratulatory on the eve of our recent financial crisis, did not see that crisis coming, and are unapologetic regarding this failure. Further, Keen believes the crisis could easily have been predicted with a proper analysis of debt, something underemphasized in neoclassical models—and notes that almost all economists that warned of the crisis came from outside the neoclassical school and based a significant part of their analysis on debt growth:

"Academic economics [has] divided into roughly six camps: the dominant neoclassical school that represent[s] perhaps 85 percent of the profession, and several small rumps called Post-Keynesian, Institutional, Evolutionary, Austrian and Marxian economics. ... Looking back on how neoclassical economics had remodeled both economic theory and economic policy, the current US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke saw two decades of achievement. Writing in 2004, he asserted that there had been:

'not only significant improvements in economic growth and productivity but also a marked reduction in economic volatility, both in the United States and abroad, a phenomenon that has been dubbed 'the Great Moderation.'Recessions have become less frequent and milder, and quarter-to-quarter volatility in output and employment has declined significantly as well. The sources of the Great Moderation remain somewhat controversial, but as I have argued elsewhere, there is evidence for the view that improved control of inflation has contributed in important measure to this welcome change in the economy.' (Bernanke 2004b; emphasis added)

"The chief economist of the OECD, Jean-Philippe Cotis, was equally sanguine about the immediate economic prospects in late May of 2007:

'In its Economic Outlook last Autumn, the OECD took the view that the US slowdown was not heralding a period of worldwide economic weakness, unlike, for instance, in 2001. Rather, a 'smooth' rebalancing was to be expected, with Europe taking over the baton from the United States in driving OECD growth. Recent developments have broadly confirmed this prognosis. Indeed, the current economic situation is in many ways better than what we have experienced in years. Against that background, we have stuck to the rebalancing scenario. Our central forecast remains indeed quite benign: a soft landing in the United States, a strong and sustained recovery in Europe, a solid trajectory in Japan and buoyant activity in China and India. ...' (Cotis 2007:7; emphasis added)

"Then, in late 2007, the 'Great Moderation' came to an abrupt end.

"Suddenly, everything that neoclassical economics said couldn't happen, happened all at once: asset markets were in free-fall, century-old bastions of finance like Lehman Brothers fell like flies, and the defining characteristics of the Great Moderation evaporated: unemployment skyrocketed, and mild inflation gave way to deflation. ...

"Neoclassical economics, far from being the font of economic wisdom, is actually the biggest impediment to understanding how the economy actually works—and why, periodically, it has serious breakdowns. If we are ever to have an economic theory that actually describes the economy, let alone one that helps us manage it, neoclassical economics has to go.

"Yet this is not how neoclassical economists themselves have reacted to the crisis. Bernanke, whose appointment as chairman of the US Federal Reserve occurred largely because he was regarded by his fellow neoclassical economists as the academic expert on the Great Depression, has argued that there is no need to overhaul economic theory as a result of the crisis. Distinguishing between what he termed 'economic science, economic engineering and economic management,' he argued that:

'the recent financial crisis was more a failure of economic engineering and economic management than of what I have called economic science [...]' " (Bernanke 2010:3)

delanceyplace.com 4/17/12 - how we decide

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - each decision we make, however rational we believe it to be, is an emotional, neurochemical tug-of-war inside our brain:

"Consider this clever experiment designed by Brian Knutson and George Loewenstein. The scientists wanted to investigate what happens inside the brain when a person makes typical consumer choices, such as buying an item in a retail store or choosing a cereal. A few dozen lucky undergraduates were recruited as experimental subjects and given a generous amount of spending money. Each subject was then offered the chance to buy dozens of different objects, from a digital voice recorder to gourmet chocolates to the latest Harry Potter book. After the student stared at each object for a few seconds, he was shown the price tag. If he chose to buy the item, its cost was deducted from the original pile of cash. The experiment was designed to realistically simulate the experience of a shopper.

"While the student was deciding whether or not to buy the product on display, the scientists were imaging the subject's brain activity. They discovered that when a subject was first exposed to an object, his nucleus accumbens (NAcc) was turned on. The NAcc is a crucial part of the dopamine reward pathway, and the intensity of its activation was a reflection of desire for the item. If the person already owned the complete Harry Potter collection, then the NAcc didn't get too excited about the prospect of buying another copy. However, if he had been craving a George Foreman grill, the NAcc flooded the brain with dopamine when that item appeared.

"But then came the price tag. When the experimental subject was exposed to the cost of the product, the insula and prefrontal cortex were activated. The insula produces aversive feelings and is triggered by things like nicotine withdrawal and pictures of people in pain. In general, we try to avoid anything that makes our insulas excited. This includes spending money. The prefrontal cortex was activated, scientists speculated, because this rational area was computing the numbers, trying to figure out if the product was actually a good deal. The prefrontal cortex got most excited during the experiment when the cost of the item on display was significantly lower than normal.

"By measuring the relative amount of activity in each brain region, the scientists could accurately predict the subjects' shopping decisions. They knew which products people would buy before the people themselves did. If the insula's negativity exceeded the positive feelings generated by the NAcc, then the subject always chose not to buy the item. However, if the NAcc was more active than the insula, or if the prefrontal cortex was convinced that it had found a good deal, the object proved irresistible. The sting of spending money couldn't compete with the thrill of getting something new.

"This data, of course, directly contradicts the rational models of micro- economics; consumers aren't always driven by careful considerations of price and expected utility. You don't look at the electric grill or box of chocolates and perform an explicit cost-benefit analysis. Instead, you outsource much of this calculation to your emotional brain and then rely on relative amounts of pleasure versus pain to tell you what to purchase. (During many of the decisions, the rational prefrontal cortex was largely a spectator, standing silently by while the NAcc and insula argued with each other.) Whichever emotion you feel most intensely tends to dictate your shopping decisions. It's like an emotional tug of war."

delanceyplace.com 4/16/12 - migration, disruption, and the great revival

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:26:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - prior to the American Revolution, the British had forbidden the colonists from moving beyond the Appalachian mountains. With American independence, the metaphorical floodgates were opened and there was a massive westward migration of Americans. But this migration had a cost—the wholesale disruption of the support provided by family, community and church, and the loneliness and alienation of the frontier. For Protestant church leaders in the East, who were already under assault from the deism of the American intellectual elite, this disruption in church membership was a crisis, and they began to form missionary societies and use revivals to take the gospel to the West. With this came a pivotal moment in American history—the Great Revival of 1801 and the Second Great Awakening:

"[Encouraged by the smaller but successful Gasper River revival in 1800, Barton] Stone announced a sacramental service for August 6, 1801. While he surely believed that people would come, neither he nor anyone else could possibly have been prepared for the response that ensued. Eyewitness accounts estimated that between 10,000 and 25,000 people came to Cane Ridge. At the time there were only a quarter-million people in all of Kentucky and only 1800 in Lexington, Kentucky's largest city. Technically this was a Presbyterian meeting, but there were many Baptists and Methodists present, including preachers from those denominations. Preaching stands were erected at several points across the camp-meeting field so that several preachers could speak at once to separate audiences. Hundreds were converted, either for the first time in their lives or as part of what Protestants often called a rededication.

"James Finley, who would later become a Methodist minister, was one of those converted at Cane Ridge, and his story was not unusual. He was 21 years of age at the time, the wayward son of a Princeton-trained Presbyterian minister. He had drifted off to the frontier and taken to drinking, dancing, and assorted other activities, all considered serious sins in the Protestant faith of the time. He went to Cane Ridge merely to observe the excitement, being determined not be drawn in. He was also an educated young man, and the frontier emotionalism of revivals was not for him. As he watched hundreds of people shrieking and gyrating in spiritual agony, he was deeply moved and felt physically weak.

"He rushed first to the woods, then to a tavern, where he took a stiff drink to calm himself. He returned to the meeting and walked again among the people caught up in revival, feeling the weight of his own sins pressing on his conscience. After a nearly sleepless night in a haystack, the next day he headed for home. Along the way he stopped in a woods to pray and fell to the ground, unable to move. Neighbors found him, took him to a nearby home and put him to bed. When he awoke, he reported, he felt spiritual release and was able to continue his journey home with the assurance that his sins were forgiven. Finley's is just one of the more vivid and detailed accounts of conversion at Cane Ridge. Another account has Rachel Martin entering into what was called 'catalepsy.' She lay in bed for nine days without moving, speaking, or eating before gaining spiritual release and conversion.

"When the revival was completed, it was referred to widely as the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since Pentecost in the first century, when St. Peter and the other apostles preached and saw thousands converted to the new faith. Stone himself ... wrote a treatise describing in systematic fashion some of the emotional gyrations that people experienced during the revival. In addition to Rachel Martin's catalepsy, he catalogued these as spiritual exercises: 'the falling exercise, jerking exercise, dancing exercise, barking exercise, laughing exercise, running exercise, and singing exercise.' Such emotional responses have made it very difficult to evaluate the Cane Ridge revival, and many of these physical manifestations were viewed unfavorably even by contemporaries. Hardly anyone in that day or since can be objective about such things.

"As one might guess, those who opposed the revivals used the 'barking exercise' to argue that these meetings were excessive. Accounts of that particular exercise described people in the throes of spiritual agony rocking back and forth, causing grunts and groans. The faster they rocked, the louder and more staccato the noise, until it eventually sounded like a bark. Critics also pointed out that along with the spiritual experiences were other more sensate and sensory excesses. Specifically, there was a good deal of alcohol consumed by those who came to the revivals more out of carnal than spiritual curiosity. Hucksters sold whisky from wagons on the outskirts of the encampment. Moreover, for those who attended primarily to be part of a good party, there were sexual liaisons, leading some to claim that more souls were conceived than saved. While revivals were almost always emotional affairs with crying, shouting, and sometimes falling, excesses such as barking and treeing the devil, often cited to discredit the revivals, were limited. With the possible exception of the early meetings, they never became regular features of the Second Great Awakening. ...

"Cane Ridge set off waves of revivals that would last for years, and this Great Revival is generally regarded as the beginning of the Second Great Awakening."

delanceyplace.com 4/13/12 - jerusalem, passover, and crucifixions

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 08:57:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - at the time of Christ, Passover was a religious observance that brought Jews from throughout the world back to Jerusalem and turned the city into a colorful, teeming and dangerous spectacle:

"At Passover, Jerusalem was at its most crowded and dangerous. ... In the Upper City, across the valley from the Temple, the grandees lived in Grecian-Roman mansions with Jewish features: the so-called Palatial Residence excavated there has spacious receiving-rooms and mikvahs. Here stood the palaces of Antipas and the high priest Joseph Caiaphas. But the real authority in Jerusalem was the prefect, Pontius Pilate, who usually ruled his province from Caesarea on the coast but always came to supervise Passover, staying at Herod's Citadel. ...

"Josephus guessed that two and a half million Jews came for Passover. This is an exaggeration but there were Jews 'out of every nation,' from Parthia and Babylonia to Crete and Libya. The only way to imagine this throng is to see Mecca during the haj. At Passover, every family had to sacrifice a lamb, so the city was jammed with bleating sheep—255,600 lambs were sacrificed. There was much to do: pilgrims had to take a dip in a mikvah every time they approached the Temple as well as buy their sacrificial lambs in the Royal Portico. Not everyone could stay in the city. Thousands lodged in the surrounding villages, like Jesus, or camped around the walls. As the smell of burning meat and heady incense wafted—and the trumpet blasts, announcing prayers and sacrifices, ricocheted—across the city, everything was focused on the Temple, nervously watched by the Roman soldiers from the Antonia Fortress. ...

"... the towering, colonnaded Royal Portico [was] the bustling, colourful, crowded centre of all life, where pilgrims gathered to organize their accommodation, to meet friends, and to change money for the Tyrian silver used to buy sacrificial lambs, doves, or, for the rich, oxen. ...

"Crucifixion, [the favored form of public execution in the region], said Josephus, was 'the most miserable death,' designed to demean the victim publicly. Hence Pilate ordered Jesus' placard to be attached to his cross—KING OF THE JEWS. Victims could be tied or nailed. The skill was to ensure victims did not bleed to death. The nails were usually driven through the forearms—not the palms—and ankles: the bones of a crucified Jew have been found in a tomb in north Jerusalem with a 4.5-inch iron nail still sticking through a skeletal ankle. Nails from crucifixion victims were popularly worn as charms, around the neck, by both Jews and gentiles to ward off illness, so the later Christian fetish for crucificial relics was actually part of a long tradition. Victims were usually crucified naked—with men facing outwards, women inwards.

"The executioners were experts at either prolonging the agony or ending it quickly. The aim was to not kill Jesus too quickly but to demonstrate the futility of defying Roman power. He was most probably nailed to the cross with his arms outstretched as shown in Christian art, supported by a small wedge, sedile, under the buttocks and a suppedaneum ledge under the feet. This arrangement meant he could survive for hours, even days. The quickest way to expedite death was to break the legs. The body weight was then borne by the arms and the victim would asphyxiate within ten minutes."

delanceyplace.com 4/12/12 - a computer that constantly scours the internet learning

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - increasing numbers of large scale projects have been launched to create highly advanced, computer-based artificial intelligence systems. The most highly publicized of these has been "Watson," the system built by IBM which defeated the highest-rated Jeopardy champions. Another such system is NELL, which scours the world wide web reading and learning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and within its first six months of operation had developed some four hundred thousand beliefs:

"How could computers get smarter about the world? Tom Mitchell, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, had an idea. He would develop a system that, just like millions of other students, would learn by reading. As it read, it would map all the knowledge it could make sense of. It would learn that Buenos Aires appeared to be a city, and a capital too, and for that matter also a province, that it fit inside Argentina, which was a country, a South American country. The computer would perform the same analysis for billions of other entities. It would read twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It would be a perpetual reading machine, and by extracting information, it would slowly cobble together a network of knowledge: every president, continent, baseball team, volcano, endangered species, crime. Its curriculum was the World Wide Web.

"Mitchell's goal was not to build a smart computer but to construct a body of knowledge-a corpus-that smart computers everywhere could turn to as a reference. This computer, he hoped, would be doing on a global scale what the human experts in chemistry had done, at considerable cost, for the Halo system. [Paul Allen's artificial intelligence system.] Like Watson, Mitchell's Read-the-Web computer, later called NELL, would feature a broad range of analytical tools, each one making sense of the readings from its own perspective. Some would compare word groups, others would parse the grammar. 'Learning method A might decide, with 8o percent probability, that Pittsburgh is a city,' Mitchell said. 'Method C believes that Luke Ravenstahl is the mayor of Pittsburgh.' As the system processed these two beliefs, it would find them consistent and mutually reinforcing. If the entity called Pittsburgh had a mayor, there was a good chance it was a city. Confidence in that belief would rise. The computer would learn.

"Mitchell's team turned on NELL in January 2010. It worked on a subsection of the Web, a cross section of two hundred million Web pages that had been culled and curated by Mitchell's colleague Jamie Callan. (Operating with a fixed training set made it easier in the early days to diagnose troubles and carry out experiments.) Within six months, the machine had developed some four hundred thousand beliefs-a minute fraction of what it would need for a global knowledge base. But Mitchell saw NELL and other fact-hunting systems growing quickly. 'Within ten years,' he predicted, 'we'll have computer programs that can read and extract 80 percent of the content of the Web, which itself will be much bigger and richer.' This, he said, would produce 'a huge knowledge base that AI (artificial intelligence) can work from.' "

delanceyplace.com 4/11/12 - washington crosses the delaware

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - at the very moment of General George Washington's meticulously planned crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Day, 1776, the operation began to unravel. Not only that, but he received correspondence indicating that his main rival for leadership of the American army, General Horatio Gates, was going over his head to criticize his plans. Up to that point, Washington had lost more battles than he had won, while Gates's record in battle was excellent. Therefore Washington's planned surprise attack upon the British across the river at Trenton now had two purposes - to send a message to the British about American resolve, and to send a message to Congress about his own generalship:

"No sooner had [American] forces mustered on Christmas afternoon than Washington's schedule began to come apart. The old army saying that 'no battle plan survives contact with the enemy' is only half correct. Most plans do not survive contact with one's friends. Washington's plan miscarried that way during the first hour of the operation. He had wanted the army to march from their separate camps toward three crossing points on the Delaware River and assemble away from the water's edge, out of sight from New Jersey. It was urgently important to his plan that the troops should reach their assembly areas before sunset (about 4:41 p.m. that day), so that they could move to the river at nightfall and cross as soon as the sky was dark enough to hide their movements.

"Time was vital to the success of the operation. Washington reckoned that his Continental troops at the upstream crossing had to march about ten miles in New Jersey from McConkey's Ferry to Trenton. To achieve surprise, he wanted to attack the town before dawn, at five o'clock in the morning. The plan would work only if the army began to cross the Delaware just after dark and assembled in New Jersey ready to march no later than midnight, a very tight schedule. To that end, he ordered the army to parade in Pennsylvania 'precisely at four in the afternoon.'

"The schedule failed even before the march began. John Greenwood recalled that his regiment did not leave camp until after four o'clock, about a half hour before sunset. ...

The same delays happened up and down the river. ...

"As if that were not trouble enough, a travel-stained officer rode up to George Washington just as he was leaving his quarters for the river and handed him a dispatch. The courier was Major James Wilkinson, who had ridden all day on treacherous roads from Philadelphia. Wilkinson remembered the moment when he reached the commander-in-chief. 'I found him alone with his whip in his hand, prepared to mount his horse,' he recalled. The major delivered a sealed letter, and the general was not happy to receive it. 'What a time is this to hand me letters!' he said. Wilkinson apologized and explained that he was acting on orders from General Gates.

"General Gates!" Washington said. "Where is he?"

"I left him this morning in Philadelphia," Wilkinson replied.

"What was he doing there?"

"I understood him that he was on his way to Congress."

" 'On his way to Congress,' the general said, as he opened the letter. The messenger departed hastily. 'I made my bow,' Wilkinson remembered, and he went quickly toward the river to join the crossing as a volunteer. The young major knew what was in the dispatch, and he preferred the wrath of the enemy to the fury of his commander-in-chief.

"The letter he brought from Horatio Gates has not survived, but Wilkinson remembered that Gates had 'appeared much depressed in mind, and frequently expressed an opinion that while General Washington was watching the enemy above Trenton, [the enemy] would privately construct batteaux, pass the Delaware in his rear and take possession of Philadelphia.' Wilkinson also heard Gates say that 'General Washington ought to retire to the South of the Susquehanna, and there form an army; he said it was his intention to propose the measure to Congress at Baltimore.' He asked Wilkinson to come with him, but the major wisely refused and made his way to George Washington.

"In the past several days, Horatio Gates had grown distant from Washington, even to the edge of insubordination. Just before Christmas, Washington had asked him to take a command in the Trenton operation. Gates begged off, pleading illness, and asked permission to go to Philadelphia on account of his health. Washington agreed but urged him to stop at Bristol on his way and help sort out some 'uneasiness of command' between Hitchcock's Continentals and Cadwalader's militia there. Gates refused again, openly defying his commander-in-chief. He claimed he was too ill to stop at Bristol, but he was well enough to ride another hundred miles to Baltimore and seek out the president of Congress. Horatio Gates was going over the head of his commander-in-chief, seeking to persuade Congress to overrule Washington's plan of operations, and perhaps hoping to replace him. All this came to a head just at the moment when the army was crossing the Delaware. Washington was thunderstruck, and Wilkinson witnessed a flash of his formidable temper. But the general did not permit himself the luxury of rage against a wayward subordinate. With his iron self-discipline, Washington returned to the task at hand, which was to get his army across the Delaware."

delanceyplace.com 4/10/12 - procter and gamble invents a new mop

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - creative failure and the challenge of inventing a new floor cleaner:

"Procter and Gamble had a problem: it needed a new floor cleaner. In the 1980s, the company had pioneered one lucrative consumer product after another, from pull-up diapers to anti-dandruff shampoo. It had developed color-safe detergent and designed a quilted paper towel that could absorb 85 percent more liquid than other paper towels. These innovations weren't lucky accidents: Procter and Gamble was deeply invested in research and develop- ment. At the time, the corporation had more scientists on staff than any other company in the world, more PhDs than the faculties of MIT, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard combined.

"And yet, despite the best efforts of the chemists in the household-cleaning division, there were no new floor products in the pipeline. The company was still selling the same lemon-scented detergents and cloth mops; consumers were still sweeping up their kitchens using wooden brooms and metal dustpans. The reason for this creative failure was simple: it was extremely difficult to make a stronger floor cleaner that didn't also damage the floor. Although Procter and Gamble had invested millions of dollars in

a new generation of soaps, these products tended to fail during the rigorous testing phase, as they peeled off wood varnishes and irritated delicate skin. The chemists assumed that they had exhausted the chemical possibilities.

"That's when Procter and Gamble decided to try a new approach. The company outsourced its innovation needs to Continuum, a design firm with offices in Boston and Los Angeles. 'I think P and G came to us because their scientists were telling them to give up,' says Harry West, a leader on the soap team and now Continuum's CEO. 'So they told us to think crazy, to try to come up with something that all those chemists couldn't.'

"But the Continuum designers didn't begin with molecules. They didn't spend time in the lab worrying about the chemistry of soap. Instead, they visited people's homes and watched dozens of them engage in the tedious ritual of floor cleaning. The designers took detailed notes on the vacuuming of carpets and the sweeping of kitchens. When the notes weren't enough, they set up video cameras in living rooms. 'This is about the most boring footage you can imagine,' West says. 'It's movies of mopping, for God's sake. And we had to watch hundreds of hours of it.' ...

"Unfortunately, the Continuum designers couldn't think of a better cleaning method. It seemed like an impossible challenge. Perhaps floor cleaning was destined to be an inefficient chore.

'In desperation, the team returned to making house visits, hoping for some errant inspiration. One day, the designers were watching an elderly woman sweep some coffee grounds off the kitchen floor. She got out her hand broom and carefully brushed the grounds into a dustpan. But then something interesting happened. After the woman was done sweeping, she wet a paper towel and wiped it over the linoleum, picking up the last bits of spilled coffee. Although everyone on the Continuum team had done the same thing countless times before, this particular piece of dirty paper led to a revelation.

"What the designers saw in that paper towel was the possibility of a disposable cleaning surface. 'All of a sudden, we realized what needed to be done,' says Don Buchner, a Continuum vice president. 'We needed to invent a spot cleaner that people could just throw away. No more cleaning mop heads, no more bending over in the bathtub, no more buckets of dirty water. Thatwas our big idea.' ... [After initial rejection by both P and G management and consumers in focus groups, positive reaction by consumers using prototypes convined P and G to proceed.] Tests by Procter and Gamble demonstrated that the new product cleaned the floor far better than sponge mops, string mops, or any other kinds of mops. According to the corporate scientists, the 'tissue on a stick' was one of the most effective floor cleaners ever invented. ...

"Numerous imitators and spinoffs have since been introduced, but the original device continues to dominate the post-mop market, taking up an ever greater share of the supermarket aisle. Its name is the Swiffer."

delanceyplace.com 4/9/12 - eisenhower, bernstein, blacklists, and lincoln center

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:13:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - President Dwight Eisenhower and iconic American composer Leonard Bernstein shook hands at the ground-breaking ceremony for New York's Lincoln Center, which was destined to become the performing arts center of the world. In the Cold War paranoia of the time, that handshake masked the animosity the U.S. government had shown to Bernstein, Aaron Copland and myriad of other artists who had shown sympathy and involvement with socialist and communists causes during the despairing days of the Great Depression:

"On the morning of May 14,1959, an excited crowd of thousands gathered at Broadway and West 64th Street to witness ground-breaking ceremonies for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The day was a glorious one for New Yorkers, for their new complex—concentrating in one place the city's world-class dance, orchestral, and operatic ensembles and a new repertory theater—would be proof visible of New York's cultural ascendancy. In the words of urban-planning czar Robert Moses, Lincoln Center would make the city the 'World Center of the Performing Arts,' a complement to its place as 'World Political Capital.'

"Festivities began at 11 a.m. with master of ceremonies Leonard Bernstein leading the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. Bernstein then introduced the guest of honor, President Eisenhower, who thanked the artists and praised the many people within government, labor, business, and charitable foundations who had worked to make Lincoln Center possible. He predicted that the 'increasing interest in America in cultural matters would 'influence . . . peace and understanding throughout the world.' The president then dug up a shovelful of earth to inaugurate construction of the center's first building, Philharmonic Hall, and turned to shake Bernstein's hand.

"This handshake was a fitting way to celebrate the partnership between American political aspiration and high culture. For some years, Bernstein had been a cultural ambassador for the United States. He had toured Latin America with the New York Philharmonic in 1958 and, at the behest of the State Department, was about to go on tour to the Soviet Union, a trip that had great significance in the administration's quest for a thaw in the otherwise glacial Cold War. ...

"Leonard Bernstein ... was the composer [for] the great New York ballet Fancy Free and the New York musicals On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953), and West Side Story (composed in 1957 and just coming to the end of its great Broadway run at the time of the Lincoln Center groundbreaking), and he had been the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1957 and music director since 1958. He was a Columbia Records star performer; a gifted television educator; a celebrity much photographed and lionized by Time, Life, and other mass-circulation magazines; and a man at home in both highbrow and middle-brow worlds. Now, on this day of celebration, the already formidable Bernstein, the most magisterial of New York's creative and performing artists, was receiving the president's personal recognition as the sovereign of this new center for the performing arts.

"Yet this seemingly unambiguously celebratory day had interesting ironies, known only by Bernstein and a few others. For example, as the maestro gave the downbeat to the Philharmonic's brass section to begin Copland's Fanfare, only a tiny minority of the onlookers were likely aware, as Bernstein certainly was, that only six years before, in 1953, Eisenhower had banned a performance of Copland's Lincoln Portrait at his inauguration because Copland was a supporter of left-wing causes. Did the crowd know that President Truman, in February 1950, had banned Bernstein's music from overseas State Department libraries and functions? Or that in 1953, Eisenhower's State Department had revoked Bernstein's passport on the grounds that the maestro was a security risk, returning it only after Bernstein, his conducting career on the verge of wreckage, agreed to sign an affidavit confessing to political sins? These darker events were certainly in Bernstein's mind, and perhaps Eisenhower's, as the two Olympians shook hands in joint celebration.

"Such were the paradoxes and ironies of that day: the fanfare, waving flags, and hearty handshakes masking a closely guarded tale of presidentially authorized censorship, intimidation, and humiliation ... [and Bernstein's] blacklisting by CBS in 1950."

delanceyplace.com 4/6/12 - the mind-numbing size of our current deficit

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt-the unprecedented, mind-numbing size of the current budget deficit. In 2000, federal spending was 18% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP, which is the primary measure of the size of the economy). In 2011, it was 24% of GDP, or about $900 billion dollars more in annual spending than in 2000—an increase that came primarily from military spending and healthcare programs. Regardless of an individual's preferred solution to this fiscal crisis—conservative, liberal, or somewhere in between-the scope of the issue is daunting and worth reflection if only for its sheer size. Here the size if the deficit is framed by noted conservative economist John Taylor:

"Spending has grown to be much larger than revenues in recent years. In 2011 federal spending was $3.6 trillion and revenues were $2.3 trillion. As a result, the deficit—the difference between spending and revenues—was $1.3 trillion, or 9 percent of GDP, about the same percentage as in 2010. The federal government is so deep in the debt hole that it has to borrow more than one-third of what it spends. And it is expected to stay in the hole; the budget will remain in deficit and then the deficit will actually increase in later years if policy is not changed. ...

"So how do we get from gigantic deficits to a balanced budget? Let's start with how much the federal government is actually spending now, which is about 24 percent when measured as a ratio to GDP. Next let's consider how much the government was spending before the debt started its explosive climb around 2007. In that year spending was 19.5 percent of GDP. A commonsense and quite reasonable budget plan would be to insist simply that federal spending be brought down from 24 percent to 19.5 percent of GDP and then held there.

"It is important to recognize that a plan such as this, which reduces spending as a percentage of GDP, does not necessarily mean that the number of dollars actually spent by the government declines. In fact, under this plan government spending would increase in tandem with GDP. Government spending would grow from $3.5 trillion in 2011 to $3.9 trillion in 2016 to $4.7 trillion in 2021 under the assumption that GDP grows according to the CBO's forecast.

"Some people may want to argue that the percentage should be lower, say, 18 percent of GDP, which was what the government spent in the year 2000. If so, they can think of this proposal as a compromise position. The 19.5 percent number does not violate the principles of economic freedom, and as we will see, it brings with it another advantage. In any case the 19.5 percent strategy should be doable. It is simply limiting government to the size it was before the financial crisis and the recession. It is not what one would call austerity, a term used to describe drastic and sudden declines in spending that would eliminate most essential functions of government that Americans have been accustomed to for generations."

delanceyplace.com 4/5/12 - steve martin quits stand-up

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:37:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the late 1970s, comedian Steve Martin, who had labored for years in obscurity, reached a level of success with his stand-up act that was unprecedented in comedy. But he was unprepared for the crush of this success, and left stand-up at the peak of his popularity:

"In his peak years of 1978 and '79, Martin played outdoor amphitheaters and twenty-thousand-seat coliseums, sometimes two shows a night. He was outdrawing even the top rock groups of the era. His opening acts, frustrated at having to perform for thousands of Martin fans with arrows through their heads, sometimes left the stage in tears. The intensity of his fans often bothered Martin as well; people in the crowd would yell out his punch lines, throwing off his timing. (Martin needed structure in his act; he hated to ad-lib.) 'It was a very serious job to him, and it became very stressful,' says Maple Byrne, his road manager during those years. 'He had created a monster. It had gotten past the point of where you could do what you were there to do well.' Lorne Michaels thought Martin's manager was partly to blame, trying to squeeze too much out of him. 'Bill McEuen kept him working, [telling him,] 'If you stop, you'll lose everything,' says Michaels. 'I remember one Tuesday night, late, he called me. This was like 1979. I said, 'Where are you?' He said, 'Terre Haute, Indiana.' I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'Tertiary markets.'

" 'It burned me out,' Martin acknowledges. 'But in order to keep your chops up, you gotta keep doing it, and if you take six months off, you go, where was I?' But the stress was getting to him, and he began to feel his act had peaked creatively. 'The responsibility becomes so great. I just recall thinking, it's not a show; it's another animal, and it's about being a success. I would be a little bit depressed. Something was getting to me. I kept thinking comedy was in the delivery, and the delivery was being controlled by the mass hysteria in a way. And I realized later—what I should have seen—was that this is not a comedy show; this is an event. And if I regarded it as an event, I might have come out of it happier.'

"Martin looked enviously at the relatively stable world of movies. He took a single nonsense line from his stand-up—'I was born a poor black child'—and built it into a screenplay, about the imbecilic adopted son of poor black sharecroppers who tries to make his way in the world. The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner, and released in December 1979, made a surprising forty-three million dollars at the box office and opened the door to his film career. 'I knew that while I was hot, I had better switch to something,' Martin says. 'I had no intention of turning over my act and getting a new act. I knew it was over when it was over. And I thought, now's the time. I'm hot enough to make a deal. You're on a train and it's going one way and another train passes and it's going another way, you gotta leap onto that other train when your paths are crossing.' Martin fulfilled the last of his road engagements and released one more less-successful album, The Steve Martin Brothers, in 1981. Then he quit stand-up for good."

delanceyplace.com 4/4/12 - he paid the troops out of his own pocket

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - though history has neglected him, during the American Revolution the most powerful man in the nation's de facto capital of Philadelphia—and perhaps in the entire new nation—was merchant, financier, and sometime slave-trader Robert Morris. He was the wealthiest man in the country, and was responsible more than any other individual for financing the American Revolutionary War. During which he occasionally paid American troops out of his own personal funds. After the war, he was a leader at the Constitutional Convention, and lent his Philadelphia home to be used by Presidents George Washington and John Adams as the first Executive Mansion. Later in life his massive land speculations led to economic failure and debtor's prison. He died in poverty in 1806:

"In the position [of superintendent in the American Revolutionary government, Robert] Morris acted in the capacity of treasury secretary at a time when finances were the most urgent and vexing problem confronting the new nation. More than that, Morris was the chief civil officer in the government, with full authority to hire and fire any employee of Congress or the armed forces. In a very real sense he was, as one of his critics complained, a 'pecuniary dictator.'

"His ascendance may not have been a great moment for American democracy—though his appointment was made by a unanimous vote in Congress—but it was very good for the progress of the Revolution. Faced with an empty treasury, a worthless currency, and an economy in disarray, Morris leaned heavily on his own personal fortune to provide crucial aid to General George Washington and salvage the credit of the rebel govern¬ment with key allies in Europe, and he projected in detail the scheme for federal revenues that came to be known as Alexander Hamilton's funding program.

"At the same time, Morris laid the foundation for a financial system that would establish America as the world's economic leader. He introduced the concepts of banking and commercial finance on a national basis, and persuaded a skeptical public to endorse his vision and set it in motion. He conceived, and in the years to come would implement, measures to restore the nation's credit and encourage capital formation that speak directly to the financial crisis that confronts the world today. ...

"By nature open, warm, and gregarious, just as comfortable in a grog shop as in the parlors of Philadelphia's mercantile elite, Morris was in the beginning of the war a reluc¬tant but consensus candidate for a series of important state and national offices. Over time, as the old social order was shaken by the new political forces of democracy and liberty, Morris came to be identified as a spokesman for wealth and stability, and was excoriated by early radicals like Sam¬uel Adams as a corrupting influence on the 'Republican virtue' they hoped the Revolution would foster.

"But ... his perseverance and his steadfast integrity won him the allegiance of his fellow founders—Franklin, Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams (though never his cousin Sam), and especially Washington—and he became the leader of the faction that, four years after the peace with Britain, wrote the new Constitution.

"Among this collection of imposing and often brilliant men, Morris was a principal character, a leader and an icon who dominated the councils of the Revolution. Yet he was also enormously controversial. He was rich in an era when popular ideology celebrated austerity. He was skeptical of the virtues of democracy and an unabashed global capitalist—a man ahead of his time. During the Constitutional Convention and in the first sessions of the novel United States Senate, he often let surrogates handle the floor de¬bates because he knew that the simple fact of his endorsement could kill the measures he supported.

"This infamy has persisted to the present day, taken up by historians still grinding axes that were fashioned at the time. The consequence is a curiously warped version of our national story, one that prizes the rhetoric and ideology of the founding epoch and fails to credit the essential pragmatism that distinguishes the American Revolution from so many other subsequent social upheavals."

delanceyplace.com 4/3/12 - a plague devastates the nation's capital

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1793, French-born Stephen Girard, the Philadelphia merchant who became the richest man in America, risked his own life during a catastrophic yellow fever epidemic to save the lives of hundreds of his fellow citizens:

"Stephen Girard's finest hour occurred during Philadelphia's great yellow fever epidemic in 1793. That episode, largely forgotten in American history, was one of the greatest disasters to befall any American city. The gravity of the epidemic increases when one realizes that Philadelphia was at the time the nation's temporary capital. Yellow fever, so named because the victim's skin turns a yellowish hue, is fatal to as many as half of those who contract it. If the afflicted does not successfully resist the disease, he dies a tortuous week-long death filled with bouts of high fever, chills, black vomit, and diarrhea. Were this not awful enough, the alleged cure for the malady, the one pushed by Philadelphia's leading physician, the famed Dr. Benjamin Rush, involved bloodletting and mercury purges. Rush, like Girard, bravely stayed in town and tried his utmost to aid the sick. Unfortunately, Rush's harsh treatment plan caused untold deaths.

"In 1793, the population of Philadelphia and its suburbs was approximately 45,000. Diseased mosquitoes slipped into the city during the summer, on the same ships that brought two thousand French-speaking West Indian refugees to the capital. ... Unfortunately, the mosquitoes also found Philadelphia a hospitable habitat. ... Before the epidemic ended with the November frosts, some four to five thousand Philadelphians, about 10 percent of the city's population, lay yellowed and dead in pools of vomit and excrement. In a typical day just prior to the plague, an average of three Philadelphians died. On October 11, at the peak of the plague, 119 persons met their excruciatingly painful end.

"Yet the numbers do not tell the whole story. When the existence of an epidemic was announced in mid-August, the city fell into complete panic. The 'Fever' did not discriminate: rich and poor, young and old, doctors and dock-workers were all coming down with the disease. ...

"Stephen Girard could have, indeed should have, simply left town [as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and twenty thousand other Philadelphians had done.] But instead, he chose to risk his life to save others. Though awkward physically, Girard was no coward. ... He rolled up his sleeves and plunged into the fight, the fight against the disease itself, the fight against physicians with quack cures, the fight for the honor of the French refugees who many blamed for the scourge, and the fight for his business and reputation. ...

"Girard knew that the afflicted desperately needed his help. When the call went out for volunteers, only thirty-seven stepped forward. Clearly, the hospital [established for yellow fever victims] at Bush Hill was no place for the faint of heart; the stench of death, vomit, and excrement filled the nostrils, overpowering even the strongest. After inspecting conditions at Bush Hill, Girard realized that such a small number of volunteers would prove insufficient unless they were efficiently organized. Therefore, at the September 16 meeting of the emergency plague committee, Girard and fellow Philadelphian Peter Helm offered to supervise the volunteers. Girard's actions, which many viewed as a death sentence, took observers aback.

"But Girard was not suicidal. He had experienced a brief bout of fever in August but brushed it off, proudly announcing that 'Frenchmen do not die as easily as Americans.' Like Hamilton, Girard, who was conversant with the principles of medicine due to his youthful experience as a sailor, shunned Dr. Rush's harsh treatments in favor of the milder approach [advocated by] Dr. Edward Stevens. Moreover, Girard did not believe that the disease was contagious, attributing the far-reaching nature of the epidemic instead to the widespread distribution of the city's filth.

"Girard and Helm quickly went to work at Bush Hill. ... It was a daunting task made all the more difficult by the fact that Girard had to convince the emergency committee that his preferred choice of medical chief, a French doctor who had seen yellow fever before in the West Indies, should lead the staff, not an American team influenced by Rush. Girard prevailed, so mercifully no bloodletting or mercury purges took place at Bush Hill.

"For sixty straight days Girard managed the makeshift hospital and cared for the ever-growing number of sick. When overcrowding became a problem, temporary shelters sprang up around the mansion house. A contemporary observer noted that Girard had to perform 'many disgusting offices of kindness for [the patients], which nothing could render tolerable, but the exalted motives that impelled him to this heroic conduct.' In the words of one historian, 'for the dying, Girard acted as confessor and chaplain, comforter and attorney.' "

delanceyplace.com 4/2/12 - graham nash loses his confidence

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1968, musician Graham Nash was a member of the highly successful Hollies. Depressed and questioning his own ability as an artist because his bandmates were rejecting his new direction in songwriting, he was saved by a chance meeting in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles with Stephen Stills and David Crosby. Laurel Canyon, the rambling, secluded suburb near the recording studios and music clubs of Sunset Boulevard had become the epicenter of West Coast jazz, folk, rock and blues. Laurel Canyon denizens and frequent guests included Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, John Phillips, Alice Cooper, Wayne Shorter, Cher, Glen Campbell, Bobby Womack, and Dusty Springfield to name just a few. Stills had just suffered the disintegration of Buffalo Springfield and David Crosby had left the Byrds over artistic differences. Their chance meeting led almost immediately to a smash hit; the epochal self-titled debut album Crosby, Stills & Nash:

" 'What happened,' Graham explains ... 'was that I'd written this song, "King Midas in Reverse," probably one of my earliest real songs. You know, I'm talking about myself. I'm talking about what I think about my life, and how fragile it all is. I mean every Hollies song that we made went into the Top Ten. "King Midas" didn't. And, at that point, [the other members of the Hollies] started to lose their faith in the direction that I wanted to take the band.

" 'I gotta tell you, I spent the first ten years in America kind of trying to separate myself from The Hollies. In all truth, The Hollies were a great band." In addition, The Hollies had passed on recording Nash's songs 'Teach Your Children,' 'Lady of the Island,' 'Marrakesh Express,' and 'The Sleep Song.'
'A lot of people used to say to me, "You're leaving the bloody Hollies? Are you f**kin' crazy?" All those hit records, money, and that stuff. They had not heard what I had heard.

" 'I think that my time with The Hollies was done. And I knew that instinctively. That was a little tense. I left them on December 8, 1968. On December 10, I was in Los Angeles with David (Crosby) and Stephen (Stills). I ended up at Cass Elliot's house. Cass' house was kind of a central point for a huge amount of very bright and very colorful people. ...

" 'You gotta understand. David, Stephen, and I came from harmony bands. I mean we were harmony freaks. I've said before that CS&N never had any claim on any of the notes that we sang. It's just when that sound happened, it was instantly recognized by me, David, and Stephen as something stunning.

" 'Crosby was so f**king American -American attitudes, American ego,' exclaims Nash. 'And Stephen was the same. I must say I was completely bowled over. I admire Stephen and love him dearly, but Crosby is a different animal on this planet. And I recognized it from the very first moment I ever met him. Which, of course, was through Cass. I was with two real Yanks. I was with two Americans of doom.'

" Graham's new moral support group was led by David Crosby. 'In a way, and I've said this before, he saved my arse. He saved my life. When I was in The Hollies and writing "Teach Your Children" and "Marrakesh Express" and they didn't want to deal with them, you know, it made me question myself, and that's the worst thing you can do to an artist. And so Crosby is looking at me with that impish smile, "They're f**ked, man. Don't even listen to what they are saying. I love those songs."

" 'I will never be able to repay David for what he did when The Hollies were refusing my material and I was incredibly depressed about it. By appreciating the music that they didn't want to record, I mean, Crosby has been there for me at the very beginning. When I first came to America, I didn't bring any money. It was months before my money from my bank account and The Hollies made it through all the financial scenes of being transferred to a different country. I borrowed $80,000 from Crosby and he never batted an eyelid.

" 'We knew that we had fabulous songs. ... CS&N had no formal rehearsals before they went into the studio to cut their epochal self-titled debut album. 'Our rehearsals consisted of running through the tune, and then saying, "F**k it, let's go to (Peter) Fonda's house." "F**k it, let's go to Paul Rothchild's house." "Let's go to Alan Pariser's house." "Let's go and sing them this s**t!" Eventually we could sing that entire album on a couple of acoustic guitars and blow people's f**kin' minds.' "

delanceyplace.com 3/30/12 - conical hats and yellow badges

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Europeans of the Middle Ages, just before the dawn of the Renaissance, did not prize, much less encourage, individuality, curiosity, and upward mobility:

"Southern Germany in 1417 was prosperous. The catastrophic Thirty Years' War that would ravage the countryside and shatter whole cities in the region lay far in the future, as did the horrors of our own time that destroyed much of what had survived from this period. In addition to knights, courtiers, and nobles, other men of substance busily traveled the rutted, hard-packed roads. Ravensburg, near Constance, was involved in the linen trade and had recently begun to produce paper. Ulm, on the left bank of the Danube, was a flourishing center of manufacture and commerce, as were Heidenheim, Aalen, beautiful Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and still more beautiful Wiirzburg. Burghers, wool brokers, leather and cloth merchants, vintners and brewers, craftsmen and their apprentices, as well as diplomats, bankers, and tax collectors, all were familiar sights. ...

"There were less prosperous figures too—journeymen, tinkers, knife-sharpeners, and others whose trades kept them on the move; pilgrims on their way to shrines where they could worship in the presence of a fragment of a saint's bone or a drop of sacred blood; jugglers, fortune-tellers, hawkers, acrobats and mimes traveling from village to village; runaways, vagabonds, and petty thieves. And there were the Jews, with the conical hats and the yellow badges that the Christian authorities forced them to wear, so that they could be easily identified as objects of contempt and hatred. ...

"Most people at the time signaled their identities, their place in the hierarchical social system, in visible signs that everyone could read, like the indelible stains on a dyer's hands. ... What mattered was what you belonged to or even whom you belonged to. The little couplet Alexander Pope mockingly wrote in the eighteenth century, to put on one of the queen's little pugs, could have applied in earnest in [this] world:

I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

"The household, the kinship network, the guild, the corporation—these were the building blocks of personhood. Independence and self-reliance had no cultural purchase; indeed, they could scarcely be conceived, let alone prized. Identity came with a precise, well-understood place in a chain of command and obedience.

"To attempt to break the chain was folly. An impertinent gesture—a refusal to bow or kneel or uncover one's head to the appropriate person—could lead to one's nose being slit or one's neck broken. And what, after all, was the point? It was not as if there were any coherent alternatives, certainly not one articulated by the Church or the court or the town oligarchs. The best course was humbly to accept the identity to which destiny assigned you: the ploughman needed only to know how to plough, the weaver to weave, the monk to pray. It was possible, of course, to be better or worse at any of these things; this society ... acknowledged and, to a considerable degree, rewarded unusual skill. But to prize a person for some ineffable individuality or for many-sidedness or for intense curiosity was virtually unheard of. Indeed, curiosity was said by the Church to be a mortal sin. To indulge it was to risk an eternity in hell."

delanceyplace.com 3/29/12 - billy graham and the post-war national religious revival

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Billy Graham (b. 1918) came to national prominence in 1949 as part of the national religious revival that followed World War II. His natural audience was displaced southern whites-the great early-to-mid twentieth century diaspora of white southerners away from dwindling rural jobs to the commercial north and west. He received an unexpected and indispensable boost from William Randolph Hearst, whose vast newspaper empire had influenced causes from the Spanish-American War forward:

"Graham first entered the national spotlight in the fall of 1949 during his two-month-long Christ for Greater Los Angeles campaign. The Los Angeles revival holds a firm place in the Graham mythology. He came to Southern California as a representative, if quite successful, preacher following the well-traveled fundamentalist revival circuit. ...

"Graham arrived in Los Angeles toward the start of a well-publicized postwar national religious revival that eventually saw Congress add 'one nation under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance. Churches and synagogues boomed along with the birth rate. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Graham's chosen denomination, saw five hundred new churches built between 1946 and 1949, with the denomination growing by around 300,000 members during the same period. 'Religion-in-general,' in historian Martin E. Marty's famous phrase, gained new credence during the postwar years. 'Our government,' President Dwight Eisenhower flatly declared, 'makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith-and I don't care what it is.' Such reflexive but not self-reflexive 'faith in faith' as Marty also called it, did not inevitably portend a revival of the old-time gospel. Yet it certainly offered an opening for an evangelist claiming that the faith of the fathers could resolve the conundrums of modern man.

"The Christ for Greater Los Angeles campaign took a while to gain steam. The pivotal moment came when newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst ordered his army of editors to 'Puff Graham,' words that Graham supporters have happily recounted almost from the moment their effects first registered. Hearst, ... was likely drawn to the strident anticommunist message of the dynamic young evangelist. ... Word about the lanky young evangelist quickly spread from the headlines of Los Angeles newspapers to the pages of Time, Life, and Newsweek. Graham became a religious media phenomenon to a degree unseen on North American soil since the eighteenth-century peregrinations of English evangelist George Whitefield. The hoopla thrust Graham into a national mainstream from whose current he has rarely strayed since.

"Graham's success in Los Angeles and other areas outside his native South had more to do with his southern background than is initially apparent. In his early career, the evangelist benefited from the continuing migration of white southerners westward and northward in search of industrial jobs. The white southern diaspora, a phenomenon less explored than the related Great Migration of black southerners, left a distinct imprint on twentieth-century American Christianity. The 1949 Los Angeles revival drew strength from the many fundamentalist-inclined 'country preachers' who had moved from Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma to the 'Southland' of California."

delanceyplace.com 3/28/12 - feathers, aspiration, and myth

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - from the deepest reaches of pre-history to the present, feathers have been symbols of mankind's aspirations and mysteries:

"On any given day, up to four hundred billion individual birds may be found flying, soaring, swimming, hopping, or otherwise flitting about the earth. That's more than fifty birds for every human being, one thousand birds per dog, and at least a half-million birds for every living elephant. ... Each of those birds maintains an intricate coat of feathers-from roughly one thousand on a Ruby-throated Hummingbird to more than twenty-five thousand for a Tundra Swan. ...

"Nothing competes with feathers for sheer diversity of form and function. They can be downy soft or stiff as battens, barbed, branched, fringed, fused, flattened, or simple unadorned quills. They range from bristles smaller than a pencil point to the thirty-five-foot breeding plumes of the Ongadori, an ornamental Japanese fowl. Feathers can conceal or attract. They can be vibrantly colored without using pigment. They can store water or repel it. They can snap, whistle, hum, vibrate, boom, and whine. They're a near-perfect airfoil and the lightest, most efficient insulation ever discovered. ...

"By the late Stone Age, feathered headdresses and fletched arrows appeared regularly in rock and cave art from Europe to the American Southwest to the deserts of Namibia. Already, people had co-opted feathers for uses both practical (to make an arrow fly true) and deeply cultural (as prized adornments for ceremony and status). Their varied, often vibrant colors made feathers an obvious choice for decoration. Before modern pigments, what other medium offered everything from the beige and umber of pheasants to the bright iridescence of sunbirds, mot-mots, and parrots? In time, feathers would spawn a global industry, clothe kings and courtesans alike, and define the height of fashion from Paris to New York. ...

"And if flight is sacred, then birds, wings, and feathers are its most potent symbols, appearing again and again in a dizzying range of rituals, beliefs, and customs. Birds and bird-gods figure heavily in all mythologies, and flight is the jealously guarded privilege giving them access to both the spiritual and the earthly planes. In ancient Greece, Hermes relied on winged sandals to speed his passage to and from Mount Olympus, but when the mortal boy Icarus flew too high, his wax and feather wings fell to pieces. The Hindu messenger god, Garuda, emerged from an egg with the body of a man and the plumage of an eagle. Flight earned him the honor of transporting Vishnu and gave him eternal advantage over his devious serpent-spirit adversaries, the Naga. ...

"Upon their death, ancient ancient Egyptians believed that the jackal-headed god Anubis would measure the worth of their heart, and the soul it contained, against the weight of a feather. Those found in balance entered the pleasant kingdom of Osiris. But when the scales tipped wrong, Anubis flung the offending heart into the waiting maw of Amemait, 'the Devourer,' a slavering hippo-lion-crocodile beast that crouched at his feet. In the Peruvian Amazon, the Waorani people also faced a feathery judgment at death, as described by ethnologist Wade Davis in his book One River: 'Each Waorani has a body and two souls.... [T]he one lodged in the brain ascends to the sky where it meets a sacred boa at the base of the clouds. If and only if its nostrils have been pierced and decorated by the finest of feathers can the soul enter heaven. If turned away, it falls back to earth and is consumed by worms.'

"The connection between feathers and the sacred ... found firm footing in the great monotheistic faiths as well. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and even Zoroastrianism all share a belief in angels, higher spiritual beings that serve as intermediaries on the path toward unity with God. Over the centuries, the depictions and descriptions of angels have been surprisingly consistent. They feature clearly recognizable human figures augmented by the addition of certain features. And what was added? Just what was given to the human form to symbolize an elevated, angelic state? ... Ever since Vohu Manah first appeared to Zoroaster, Michael to Moses, and Gabriel to Muhammad, angels have come equipped with great feathered wings."

delanceyplace.com 3/27/12 - the islamic roots of the european scientific revolution

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - we now think of Galileo's proof that the sun was the center of our solar system as the dawn of the scientific age, and he is often called "The Father of Modern Science." However, all scientific discovery is a continuum—the result of the work of many people. Though it is commonly known Galileo relied on Poland's Nicolaus Copernicus, we now know that Copernicus's work owed a debt to the Muslim astronomers Ibn al-Shatr and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, whose works were published by Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici. Galileo owed an even greater debt, one he never acknowledged, to the meticulous work of the German Johann Kepler and his mentor, the Dane Tycho Brahe:

"Despite his personal eccentricities Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) had compiled decades of data from his celestial observations that were far more meticulous and precise than anything previously available. His elevation of observation over speculation was one of the key developments leading to the modern concept of inductive scientific investigation. Kepler (1571-1630), though appreciative of the benefit of accurate data, was less capable of obtaining it directly. A bout of smallpox in childhood had left him frail and sickly, with a severe visual handicap: he was short-sighted and had double vision in one eye. Nor did he have the means to construct a large observatory like Tycho's Uraniborg. So he depended on Tycho for the data he needed to elaborate his theories of celestial harmony. ...

"When the published version of Kepler's The Cosmographic Mystery [the first published defense of the Copernican system] appeared, Kepler was still convinced that his connection of the planetary orbits to the five regular solids was a fundamental breakthrough toward discovering God's plan for the universe. With great enthusiasm he mailed copies to all of the influential people he could think of who had an interest in astronomical topics or might assist him in his career, but the results of these mailings would be disappoint- ing. Still, among the recipients was a thirty-three-year-old professor of mathematics at the University of Padua [Galileo Galilei], who wrote back to confess that he too was a Copernican, subscribing to the radical notion that the earth orbited around the sun. But he was afraid, he said, to state that belief publicly. Kepler responded by urging him to speak out, but Galileo did not acknowledge this second letter—in fact, he would not be in touch with Kepler again for thirteen years. The reason, according to Albert Einstein, was vanity, which he considered a failing of many great scientists. 'It has always hurt me to think,' he wrote in a letter to a friend, 'that Galileo did not acknowledge the work of Kepler.' ...

"Kepler's working calculations on the orbit of Mars take up nine hundred pages in a minuscule hand. How many more pages would he have needed if he had had to make his calculations using Roman instead of Arabic numerals? It is no longer possible to see the Scientific Revolution as a self-contained European phenomenon; exchange of ideas between Islamic West Asia and Christian Europe was a lively and vital component of the new scientific discoveries.

"Kepler had been an enthusiastic Copernican since his student days, when his embrace of heliocentrism was probably more intuitive than rational. Galileo was a more reluctant Copernican, who tried to avoid addressing the issue until led to confront it through his astronomical observations and other research. ... Copernicus (1473-1543), who had pub- lished his groundbreaking book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres just before his death in 1543, had been significantly influenced by Islamic astronomical research made centuries before his lifetime.

"In 1957 Otto Neugebauer, a scholar researching Copernicus, happened on some diagrams by the fourteenth-century astronomer Ibn al-Shatr, and he recognized that they were identical to some in Copernicus' work. Later he found that Copernicus had also relied on the work of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, an even earlier astronomer, who had tried to revise traditional Ptolemaic astronomical theory to make it better conform to actual observation. ... It was subsequently discovered that Copernicus had even used the same letters as al-Tusi to designate the points in a key diagram, removing any lingering doubt that Copernicus had access to the work of Muslim astronomers. (Evidence for Copernicus's reliance on the work of early Islamic astronomers is summarized by George Saliba in his Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance). ...

"A remarkable Arabic publishing operation was funded by Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici, Duke of Tuscany, in Italy in the late sixteenth century. The Medici Oriental Press—relying on the library of a Turkish scholar who had fled a dispute in his homeland, arrived at Venice around 1577, and converted to Christianity—published a number of Arabic-language books. Among those publications was one based on the work of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, one of the astronomers whose work Copernicus drew upon."

delanceyplace.com 3/26/12 - the implied powers of the constitution

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:45:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - when America's Founding Fathers signed the Constitution in 1787, many believed that the new government was only authorized to do the functions specifically enumerated in that document. After all, those enumerated powers were already a bold leap forward from the Articles of Confederation. However, other signers felt that the government should be entitled to do things far beyond the enumerated powers, things "necessary and proper" to carry out its enumerated responsibilities. The difference between those two views formed an immediate rift between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson that echoes to this day—and first exploded in the battle over a bill to create the first Bank of the United States, an institution nowhere mentioned in the Constitution:

"Banks were then highly controversial, but Alexander Hamilton was at the apex of his brilliance, guiding his Bank bill through Congress, ably aided by Congressman Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, a nationalist of the most fervent type. Although the Bank bill passed the Senate on January 20, 1791, congressman and Federalist Papers co-author James Madison tried to defeat it in the House. On February 8, the diminutive Madison and his allies lost a roll call that counted 39 in favor of the Bank and only 20 opposed. The political fighting had been particularly nasty, causing one senator to state in his diary that 'some gentlemen would have been ashamed to have their speeches of this day reflected in the newspapers of tomorrow.' The attack by the mostly southern opponents to the Bank was a landmark in American history, marking as it did the birth of the agrarian or Jeffersonian wing of the Republican Party. While this stand was the agrarian Republicans' first, it was certainly not their last; they would not rest in their attempt to destroy the creative work of Hamilton and his funding system.

"Although it had passed both houses of Congress, the Bank bill was anything but a done deal. To become law, President George Washington would have to sign it, and do so before February 26, the time limit imposed by the Constitution. While Hamilton's ties to the president were many and deep, forged as they were during the crises and dangers of the Revolutionary War, Virginia's agrarian Republicans, led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Attorney General Edmund Randolph, and Madison, also had strong ties with Washington. All four gentlemen shared Virginian roots and bore the stain of slaveholding, though some more thoroughly than others. ... Most importantly, their opposition was not so much political as ideological; they vehemently opposed the Bank as unconstitutional and potentially dangerous to republican government. Jefferson and Randolph pressed the president to veto the Bank bill, and Madison's vain attempt to galvanize opposition to the Bank in Congress made it obvious where he stood.

"Washington had a decision to make. Dare he veto a bill of such importance passed by both houses of Congress and eagerly submitted by his closest economic advisor? Dare he sign the measure and face the accusation that he had passed a law that was, according to many prominent Virginians, impolitic, poor policy, and, perhaps most damning, clearly unconstitutional? Washington showed Hamilton the arguments against the Bank set forth by Randolph and Jefferson and gave him a week to respond. In essence, he placed in Hamilton's hands the power to save his creation.

"It was the sixth day, February 22, and Washington's deadline loomed. ... Hamilton [worked furiously through that night to prepare a rebuttal].

"Many observers, however, demurred or remained unconvinced of the necessity of a national bank. Hamilton believed that the long-term viability of his new funding system depended on passage of the law. The pressure to produce a flawless retort weighed heavily on him, and he rose to the challenge. In the first clear articulation of the broad or loose interpretation of the Constitution, Hamilton argued that the Bank, though not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was clearly constitutional because 'every power vested in a Government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term, a right to employ all means requisite and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power.'

"Hamilton had turned the tables on his opposition. Where Jefferson, Madison, and Randolph argued that the federal government had no power to incorporate a bank because it was not explicitly allowed to do so in the Constitution, Hamilton retorted that the government enjoyed all powers necessary to its functioning that were not explicitly forbidden. Hamilton's logic was unanswerable. From that day forth the doctrine of 'implied powers' increasingly dominated legal interpretation of the Constitution. Hamilton had gained not one but two victories, the establishment of the Bank and the widespread acceptance of the doctrine of implied powers.

"Washington signed the bill on February 25. The centerpiece of Hamilton's creation was in place. The creator had once again triumphed. However, the 'triumvirate' of Madison, Randolph, and Jefferson was horrified that their fellow Virginian had signed the bill. As one pamphleteer noted, 'the great Washington burst from the trammels which had been prepared for him, shook off the bias on which the triumvirate had placed their main dependence, and to the great mortification of their party, fixed his signature on the bill.' The agrarian trio would not soon forget."

delanceyplace.com 3/23/12 - teenage gospel sensation aretha franklin

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the black neighborhoods of Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s were teeming with teenaged musical talent—Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Otis Williams and others. Most passed through the doors of the 4,500 seat New Bethel Baptist Church, pastored by the "flashy bon vivant" Reverend C.L. Franklin—so high-profile that he merited mention in Time magazine. In the decades leading up to the 1950s, more blacks from the South had poured into Detroit—filling churches like Reverend Franklin's—than any other Northern city, seeking the solid-paying jobs of the automobile industry. The young singing star of Reverend Franklin's church, a touring gospel star by the time she was fourteen and an object of fascination for teens in the neighborhood, was his daughter Aretha:

"While Aretha was discovering her vocal capacities on the altar of the New Bethel Baptist Church, the surrounding Detroit neighborhood was humming with music of all sorts. Otis Williams recalls hearing wonderful things about that little Franklin girl who had people in awe of her voice when she sang on Sundays. In 1964, Williams became world-famous as one of the Temptations. A skinny little neighborhood girl named Diane Ross joined two school friends, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, and together they became the Supremes. (When she became famous, Ross changed her name from Diane to Diana.) Friends of the Franklins, the Robinsons, had a little boy named William, and he was interested in becoming a pop singer. Everyone called William by his nickname, 'Smokey.' ...

"According to Smokey Robinson, 'When Aretha was a child she could go to the piano and play—nearly like she plays now! None of the rest of us could just go sit down and play the piano and sing like that!'

"Aretha remembers all of these singing stars as kids in the neighborhood with little more than their dreams and their vocal talent. 'I didn't really know Diana,' she reminisces. 'On my way home, I would see her from time to time. She was screaming off the back porch one night at somebody, and I said, 'Oh, that's that Diane Ross girl.' Smokey and I—our families had been friends going back till I was nine, ten years old. Smokey would come over with his group [The Miracles] to rehearse. Erma and I used to love the Flamingos. We did 'I Only Have Eyes for You.' We knew all the Flamingos' dance routines, so when Smokey was trying to put something together for the Miracles, we showed him what we knew. That was probably one of their first bits of choreography. And we did it gratis!"

"Music industry executive Billy Davis distinctly remembers that era in Detroit. 'In hindsight, there certainly was a lot of young talent who was inspired by each other,' he recalls, 'and inspired by groups like the Dominoes, the Four Buddies, Ruth Brown, the Ravens, and groups who gained their popularity in the mid-fifties. Independent record labels began to spring up, because all this talent was there. It was easy to put out a record in those days, and very cheap. In 1956, with $500 you could record it, press it, and take it around to your local stations and get it played. Within two or three weeks you might have yourself a hit. It was very active and alive and inspiring. You could discover a talent one day, have them in the studio within a week, and have a record out and on the air within two weeks. It was an exciting time in Detroit.'

"Before Motown Records was founded, and made million-selling stars out of the Miracles, the Supremes, and the Temptations, the local musical marvel was clearly Aretha Franklin. Don Davis, who grew up to own a recording studio in Detroit called United Sound ... remembers those days, when all eyes were on teenage Aretha. 'We spent an awful lot of time as kids in Reverend Franklin's church,' says Don. 'Those Sunday nights, when he would finish preaching, we would listen to little Aretha up on-stage, and she'd turn the whole church on its cheek. Man, we'd look forward to that!' "

delanceyplace.com 3/22/12 - romans did not know their ages

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - as many as half of the people in classical Rome and medieval Europe did not know their age:

"The average numeracy and literacy of even rich people in the classical and medieval eras in Europe was surprisingly poor. [For example], Aurelius Isidorus, a prosperous landowner in Roman Egypt in the third century AD, gave five known age declarations. No two of the declarations are consistent. Clearly, Isidorus had no clear idea of his own age. Within two years' time he gives ages that differ by eight years. Other sources show that Isidorus was illiterate.

"Isidorus's age declarations show a common pattern for those who are innumerate and illiterate. That is a tendency to round the age to one ending in a 0 or a 5. In populations in which ages are recorded accurately, 20 percent of the recorded ages will end in 5 or 0. We can thus construct a score variable H—which measures the degree of 'age heaping' where H = 5/4(X-20) and X is the percentage of age declarations ending in 5 or 0—to measure the percentage of the population whose real age is unknown. ...

"A lack of knowledge of their true age was widespread among the Roman upper classes as evidenced by age declarations made by their survivors on tombstones, which show a high degree of age heaping. Typically half had ages unknown to their survivors. ... When we compare this with death records for modern Europe we find that by the eve of the Industrial Revolution, age awareness in the general population had increased markedly. In the eighteenth century in Paris, only 15 percent of the general population had unknown ages at the time of death, in Geneva 23 percent and in Liege 26 percent.

"We can also look at the development of age awareness by examining censuses of the living. Some of the earliest of these are for medieval Italy, including the famous Florentine catasto of 1427, a wide-ranging survey of wealth for tax purposes. Even though Florence was then one of the richest cities of the world and the center of the Renaissance, 32 percent of the city's population did not know their ages. In comparison, a census in 1790 of the small English town of Corfe Castle, with a mere 1239 inhabitants, most of them laborers, shows that all but 8 percent knew their age. The poor in England around 1800 had more age awareness than office holders in the Roman Empire. ...

"Another feature of the Roman tombstone age declarations is that many ages were greatly overstated. We know that life expectancy in ancient Rome was perhaps as low as 20-25 at birth. Yet the tombstones record people as dying at ages as high as 120. In North Africa, 3 percent allegedly died at 100 or more. Almost all these great ages must be complete fantasy. In comparison, a set of 250 relatively prosperous testators in England circa 1600, whose ages can be established from parish records, had a highest age at death of 88. Yet the children and grandchildren who memorialized richer Romans did not detect any implausibility in recording these fabulous ages."

delanceyplace.com 3/21/12 - george washington's mother

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1782, fifty-year-old General George Washington's army had defeated the British at Yorktown, a battle that would eventually be viewed as the end of the war. But at that moment, Washington had not yet heard whether a treaty had been reached in Paris, both his country's and his personal finances were in shambles, and he was still trying to hold together soldiers who were famished and complaining of unpaid wages. In the middle of it all, he fended off the carping of his notoriously disgruntled mother and he managed to find glasses to help him with his failing eyesight:

"As he dealt with this discontent, Washington again had to deal with his disgruntled mother. Mary Washington had written to apprise him that the overseer at her Little Falls Quarter farm was pocketing all the profits for himself, and this made George no less upset than his mother. As he told [his younger] brother Jack, he had maintained this place for her with 'no earthly inducement to meddle with it, but to comply with her wish and to free her from care,' but he hadn't received a penny in return. He protested that it was 'too much while I am suffering in every other way (and hardly able to keep my own estate from sale), to be saddled with all the expense of hers and not be able to derive the smallest return from it.' This parenthetical statement-that he could hardly keep Mount Vernon safe from sale again-reveals the dreadful toll that his neglected business interests had taken on his personal fortune.

"After asking Jack to stop by Little Falls to replace the overseer, Washington mentioned that he had heard nothing further of their mother's petition for a pension from the Virginia assembly. But it turned out that Mary was still up to her old antics and broadcasting her financial grievances to anyone who cared to listen. As Washington worried anew that she would blacken his reputation, his repressed anger toward her, long tamped down, spilled out. He told his brother that he had learned 'from very good authority that she is upon all occasions and in all companies complaining of the hardness of the times, of her wants and distresses; and if not in direct terms, at least by strong innuendoes, inviting favors which not only makes her appear in an unfavorable point of view, but those also who are connected with her.' As someone who jealously guarded his reputation, Washington was crestfallen by Mary's unending torrent of abuse, and he dispatched Jack on a private mission to visit her and 'inquire into her real wants and see what is necessary to make her comfortable.' As always, Washington was ready to pay what she needed, but he demanded that she halt the character assassination: 'I wish you to represent to her in delicate terms the impropriety of her complaints and acceptance of favors, even where they are voluntarily offered, from any but relations.' As always, the headstrong mother and son were locked in a fierce contest of wills in which both sides refused to yield an inch.

"Around this time Washington discovered that his vision had grown slightly blurry and that it cleared when he borrowed spectacles from his colleagues. He had become older and wearier during this long war, and the eyestrain caused by reading his copious correspondence had been enormous. He ordered a pair of handsome silver-framed reading glasses from David Rittenhouse of Philadelphia, a renowned astronomer and optical expert. Washington sampled the lenses of various people, then asked Rittenhouse to duplicate the ones that worked best. By mid-February he had the new reading glasses in hand but had to keep tilting them at different angles until his eyes adjusted to the novel experience. 'At present, I find some difficulty in coming at the proper focus,' he informed Rittenhouse, 'but when I do obtain it, they magnify properly and show those objects very distinctly which at first appear like a mist, blended together and confused.' Little did Rittenhouse know, as he fashioned these spectacles, that they would soon serve as a key prop in one of the most emotionally charged scenes in American history."

delanceyplace.com 3/20/12 - the adverb is not your friend

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in his book, On Writing, prolific fiction writer Stephen King argues for simplicity in writing. Here he attacks the adverb:

"The other piece of advice I want to give you before moving on to the next level of the toolbox in this: The adverb is not your friend.

"Adverbs, you will remember, ... are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They're the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. ... With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn't expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.

"Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. It's by no means a terrible sentence (at least it's got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door, and you'll get no argument from me . . . but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before He closed the door firmly? Shouldn't this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn't firmly an extra word? Isn't it redundant?

"Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it's—GASP!!—too late.

"I can be a good sport about adverbs, though. Yes I can. With one exception: dialogue attribution. I insist that you use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions . . . and not even then, if you can avoid it. Just to make sure we all know what we're talking about, examine these three sentences:

"Put it down!" she shouted.
"Give it back," he pleaded, "it's mine."
"Don't be such a fool, Jekyll," Utterson said.

"In these sentences, shouted, pleaded, and said are verbs of dialogue attribution. Now look at these dubious revisions:

"Put it down!" she shouted menacingly.
"Give it back," he pleaded abjectly, "it's mine."
"Don't be such a fool, Jekyll," Utterson said contemptuously.

"The three latter sentences are all weaker than the three former ones, and most readers will see why immediately. "Don't be such a fool, Jekyll," Utterson said contemptuously is the best of the lot; it is only a cliche, while the other two are actively ludicrous. Such dialogue attributions are sometimes known as 'Swifties,' after Tom Swift, the brave inventor-hero in a series of boys' adventure novels written by Victor Appleton II. Appleton was fond of such sentences as "Do your worst!" Tom cried bravely and "My father helped with the equations," Tom said modestly. When I was a teenager there was a party-game based on one's ability to create witty (or half-witty) Swifties. "You got a nice butt, lady," he said cheekily is one I remember; another is "I'm the plumber," he said, with a flush. (In this case the modifier is an adverbial phrase.) ...

"Some writers try to evade the no-adverb rule by shooting the attribution verb full of steroids. The result is familiar to any reader of pulp fiction or paperback originals:

"Put down the gun, Utterson!" Jekyll grated.
"Never stop kissing me!" Shayna gasped.
"You damned tease!" Bill jerked out.

"Don't do these things. Please oh please. The best form of dialogue attribution is said, as in he said, she said, Bill said, Monica said."

delanceyplace.com 3/19/12 - the answer is blowin' in the wind

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1962, twenty-one year folk singer old Bob Dylan, relatively unknown and almost penniless, wrote "Blowin' in the Wind" in Manhattan. The song launched lyric writing for folk, rock and blues toward a new level of substance, reflection and poetry. It skyrocketed Dylan to fame and fortune, and ushered in a new era in music in which composers performed their own songs-the beginning of the end for Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building. But there were complications along the way:

"Bob composed 'Blowin' in the Wind' in a matter of minutes sitting in a cafe across the street from the Gaslight Club. Although he thought 'Blowin' in the Wind' special, he did not understand the full significance of what he had done. 'It was just another song I wrote.' The melody was uncannily similar to the African-American spiritual 'No More Auction Block.' However, borrowing melodies, and even lyrics, was part of the folk tradition and thus perfectly acceptable. A more pertinent criticism of 'Blowin' in the Wind' concerned the rhetorical lyrics. Many of the most distinguished folk artists in New York were underwhelmed when they first heard the song. There seemed no link between the relentless questions; and, at the end of three verses, none of the questions had been resolved, except to say the answer was blowing in the wind, an image so vague that, arguably, it meant nothing.

"Pete Seeger did not regard it highly. ' "Blowin' in the Wind" is not my favorite,' he says. 'It's a little easy.' Tom Paxton found it almost impossible to learn. 'I hate the song myself. It's what I call a grocery-list song where one line has absolutely no relevance to the next line.' Dave Van Ronk thought it dumb. Still, within a couple of months of Bob performing 'Blowin' in the Wind' at Gerde's Folk City, Van Ronk noticed to his surprise that musicians hanging around Washington Square Park had invented irreverent parodies such as, 'The answer, my friend, is blowin' out your end.' As Van Ronk says, 'If the song is strong enough, without even having been recorded, to start garnering parodies, the song is stronger than I realized.'[His manager], meanwhile, knew Bob had created something extraordinary. ' "Blowin' in the Wind" was the key to it all,' he says. 'That song made it all happen.' ...

"On July 30, 1962, 'Blowin' in the Wind,' the song that was the foundation stone of Bob's career and a catalyst of the singer-songwriter revolution, was copyrighted to M. Witmark & Sons. The same day, [Dylan's new manager Albert] Grossman signed what Bob later called 'a secret deal' with M. Witmark & Sons giving Grossman fifty percent of Witmark's share of the publishing income generated by any songwriter he brought to the company. Now Grossman stood to earn a substantial slice of Bob's publishing fees, over and above the [20 percent] cut he took for managing him. This backhanded deal was one of Bob's primary complaints when he and Grossman were in legal dispute in the 1980s, although in fairness Grossman was getting an enhanced part of Witmark's share, and not necessarily money Bob himself would have received. Bob claimed indignantly that he had known nothing of Grossman's fifty percent deal with M. Witmark & Sons (Grossman insisted he had told him). Bob also claimed to have had no idea Grossman was given as much as $100,000 to advance to him for signing with M. Witmark & Sons, of which he received one percent. Bob's attorneys asserted that Grossman had 'willfully and maliciously' concealed vital information. The secretiveness was what angered Bob who was, of course, a very secretive person himself.

"However, this was not the end of Grossman's machinations. The last part of his plan was, in fact, the cleverest. If Peter, Paul and Mary [a group Grossman had created] had a hit with a Bob Dylan-Witmark song, Grossman would earn fourfold. He had his management fee from the two acts, plus his twenty-five percent of Peter, Paul and Mary's recording income from Warner Bros., plus fifty percent of the income Witmark earned from publishing a Dylan song. When Peter, Paul and Mary had a massive hit with 'Blowin' in the Wind,' and top-forty success with two further songs written by Dylan, Grossman became as rich as Croesus.

"Suddenly, money had become very important."

delanceyplace.com 3/16/12 - habits are controlled by your basal ganglia cells

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 10:55:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - when a habit is formed, that activity is governed by your basal ganglia cells, in a region completely separate from the primary cognitive areas of your brain. That's why you can brush your teeth or give someone your phone number without giving it the slightest thought, and while thinking intensely about something completely different:

"The process—in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine—is known as 'chunking,' and it's at the root of how habits form. There are dozens—if not hundreds—of behavioral chunks that we rely on every day. Some are simple: You automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, such as getting dressed or making the kids' lunch, are a little more complex.

"Others are so complicated that it's remarkable a small bit of tissue that evolved millions of years ago can turn them into habits at all. Take the act of backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, the driveway required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: It involves opening the garage, unlocking the car door, adjusting the seat, inserting the key in the ignition, turning it clockwise, moving the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, mentally estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned and monitoring for oncoming traffic, calculating how reflected images in the mirrors translate into actual distances between the bumper, the garbage cans, and the hedges, all while applying slight pressure to the gas pedal and brake, and, most likely, telling your passenger to please stop fiddling with the radio.

"Nowadays, however, you do all of that every time you pull onto the street with hardly any thought. The routine occurs by habit.

"Millions of people perform this intricate ballet every morning, unthinkingly, because as soon as we pull out the car keys, our basal ganglia kicks in, identifying the habit we've stored in our brains related to backing an automobile into the street. Once that habit starts unfolding, our [primary] gray matter is free to quiet itself or chase other thoughts, which is why we have enough mental capacity to realize that Jimmy forgot his lunchbox inside.

"Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often. This effort-saving instinct is a huge advantage. An efficient brain requires less room, [and] ... also allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic behaviors, so we can devote mental energy to inventing ... video games. ...

"This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: Over time, this loop—cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward—becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges. Eventually... a habit is born.

"Habits aren't destiny. [They] can be ignored, changed, or replaced. But the reason the discovery of the habit loop is so important is that it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically.

"However, simply understanding how habits work—learning the structure of the habit loop—makes them easier to control. Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears."

delanceyplace.com 3/15/12 - kit carson, beaver, and indians

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - any discussion of the expansiveness and fierce independence of the American character must center in part on the mountain men of the early American West. Here we find a very young Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson (1809 - 1868), who became the most famous of these mountain men, learning the trade of beaver trapping in the early 1800s:

"[Nineteen-year old] Kit Carson began to soak up the nuances of the trapping trade—how to read the country and follow its most promising drainages, how to find the 'slicks' along the banks where beavers had slithered from their tree stands, how to set and scent the traps with a thick yellow oil called castoreum taken from the beaver's sex glands, how to prepare and pack the pelts, how to cache them safely in the ground to prevent theft and spoilage. And when the traps came up empty, how to invade and dismantle a dam and club the unsuspecting animals in their dark, wet den.

"From his new comrades, Carson learned to savor beaver tail boiled to an exquisite tenderness—the trapper's signature dish. He became expert with a Hawken rifle and a Green River skinning knife. He began to pick up the strange language of the mountain men, a colorful patois of French, Spanish, English, and Indian phrases mixed with phrases entirely of their own creation. 'Wagh!' was their all-purpose interjection. They spoke of plews (pelts) and fofurraw (any unnecessary finery). They 'counted coup' (revenge exacted on an avowed enemy) and when one of their own was killed, they were 'out for hair' (scalps). They said odd things like 'Which way does your stick float?' (What's your preference?). They met once a year in giant, extended open-air festivals, the 'rendezvous', where they danced fandangos and played intense rounds of monte, euchre, and seven-up. Late at night, sitting around the campfires, sucking their black clay pipes, they competed in telling legendary whoppers about their far-flung travels in the West—stories like the one about the mountain valley in Wyoming that was so big it took an echo eight hours to return, so that a man bedding down for the night could confidently shout 'Git up!' and know that he would rise in the morning to his own wake-up call.

"From these men, too, Carson began to learn how to deal with the Western Indians—how to detect an ambush, when to fight, when to bluff, when to flee, when to negotiate. It is doubtful whether any group of nineteenth-century Americans ever had such a broad and intimate association with the continent's natives. The mountain men lived with Indians, fought alongside and against them, loved them, married them, buried them, gambled and smoked with them. They learned to dress, wear their hair, and eat like them. They took Indian names. They had half-breed children. They lived in tepees and pulled the travois and became expert in the ways of Indian barter and ancient herbal remedy. Many of them were half-Indian themselves, by blood or inclination. Washington Irving, writing about Western trappers, noted this tendency: 'It is a matter of vanity and ambition with them to discard everything that may bear the stamp of civilized life, and to adopt the manners, gestures, and even the walk of the Indian. You cannot pay a freetrapper a greater compliment than to persuade him you have mistaken him for an Indian brave.'

"The fur trappers knew firsthand that Native Americans were ferocious fighters—some legendarily so, like the Blackfoot and the Comanche. But they also knew that the Indian style of battle was often very different from European warfare, that it was difficult to engage Native Americans in a pitched battle, that their method was consistently one of raid and ambush, attack and scatter, snipe and vanish. The mountain men said that Indians were often like wolves: Run, and they follow; follow, and they run."

delanceyplace.com 3/14/12 - american folk music tops the charts

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the 1950s, amid the saccharine hits of The Chipmunks and Doris Day—and against the background of the payola scandal—American folk music found its way to the top of the charts. Groups such as The Weavers and The Kingston Trio had hits, and college students flocked to the grittier offerings of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Odetta. One of these was a University of Minnesota student later known as Bob Dylan:

"American folk music had been recorded as early as the 1880s, and was popular in rural areas until the Depression, which killed the industry by rendering country people too poor to buy records. Folk music started to recover in the 1940s, and in 1950 The Weavers, a radical singing group featuring Pete Seeger, enjoyed an unexpected folk hit when they recorded a version of Leadbelly's 'Goodnight Irene.' It was the most popular song that year. By the end of the 1950s, partly as an antidote to the anodyne pop music of the time, exemplified by artists like Doris Day, folk music had begun its great popular revival. The payola scandal of 1960, revealing that music labels commonly paid bribes to get pop records played on the radio, was a further unexpected boost for folk music. In contrast to the pop charts, folk music seemed refreshingly untainted.

"A sign that there was a major change in the public's musical tastes came in the fall of 1958 when The Kingston Trio, a clean-cut vocal group of three young men, had a number-one hit with the folk standard 'Tom Dooley.' The record shared radio time with bubblegum tunes like 'The Chipmunk Song,' by The Chipmunks, and 'To Know Him Is to Love Him,' by The Teddy Bears. Although The Kingston Trio performed folk songs, their style was too prissy for the tastes of the college students who hung out at the [college coffee shops]. Students' musical heroes were grittier folk and blues artists like Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. Another favorite was Odetta, a classically trained African-American vocalist with a formidable stage presence, who sang traditional songs like 'Jack O'Diamonds' and 'Mule Skinner Blues' in an almost operatic contralto. Odetta was one of Bob's [Dylan] important early influences. 'The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta,' he has said. 'I heard a record of hers in a record store . . . Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar.'

"Those that followed or considered themselves part of the folk revival placed great importance on an elusive quality in music that might be described as authenticity. To be respected in the folk community, musicians had to perform traditional songs in a manner true to the original, while also making the songs distinctively their own. The starting point was to find and learn from the earliest and purest forms of the songs. This involved a degree of musical archaeology. Folk societies, including the Minneapolis Folklore Society, sent away to the Library of Congress for field recordings of hillbilly musicians, convicts, farm workers, and cowboys. Many of the recordings had been made by John Lomax and his son, Alan, the musicologists who had discovered Leadbelly in a Louisiana jail in the early 1930s.

"Some of the older songs sung by convicts, cowboys, and rural workers were known to academics as Child ballads, songs catalogued by Harvard professor Francis Child that originated in the British Isles and were still sung by descendants of immigrants, particularly in the isolated communities of the Appalachian mountains. These songs had endured through centuries, and across cultural and geographical divides, because they dealt with primal experiences - faith, love, and acts of violence - and because they were written in words both poetic and true. These were the timeworn songs Bob heard when he began frequenting [a coffee shop near the University of Minnesota] and saw student musicians get up on stage to sing and play acoustic guitar."

delanceyplace.com 3/13/12 - america is a woman

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the 1600s, Europeans thought of America as a woman, a virgin woman, ripe to be sexually conquered:

"Europeans had long viewed America as a 'belle savage' [primitive, beautiful young woman]. The word America is a feminized version of the name of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. The feminization was not inadvertent. On early maps the continent is often represented by a naked native woman. Columbus had set the tone at the outset, when he claimed to have discovered the Garden of Eden on the Caribbean coast of South America-it was shaped, he said, like a nipple on a woman's breast.

"Much later, when England entered the Caribbean, Walter Raleigh still saw the region as a woman ripe for taking: 'Guayana,' he said, 'is a country that hath yet her maidenhead.' The travel writer Sam Purchas, an active cheerleader for the Virginia Company, saw Virginia in similar terms, as 'a virgin ... not yet polluted with Spaniards lust'; the name Virginia (honoring England's Virgin Queen) encapsulates this point of view. The role of the colonizers, Purchas advised, was to woo her and make her 'not a wanton minion, but an honest and Christian wife.' Needless to say, as a wife she would serve in a subordinate position.

"If the early investment returns from the Virginia colony were not impressive, William Crashaw, in a sermon to 'Adventurers and Planters of the Virginia Company,' advised, the suitors should not lose heart. Crashaw urged the 'adventurers' (investors) to be patient with the results of the 'planters' (settlers), on the grounds that even great leaders were once infants 'carried in the arms of sillie women.'

"In an elegy [of the period] entitled 'To His Mistress Going to Bed,' [English poet] John Donne inverted the conceit of colonialism as sexual conquest, comparing his mistress to the continent:

"Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be."

delanceyplace.com 3/12/12 - patti smith and the chelsea hotel

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1967, the summer of love and riots in New York City, rock and roll legend Patti Smith and the provocative photographer Robert Mapplethorpe began a deep, life long relationship, which ended in 1989 when Mapplethorpe died of AIDS. Struggling and unknown, the pair, both in their early twenties, moved into the infamous Chelsea Hotel surrounded by poets, musicians and artists. Here Patti Smith recounts the moment:

"I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to wind up there. We could have had a fair-sized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.

"It took a while, but as Robert got stronger and more fully recovered (he was suffering from both trench mouth and gonorrhea), he thrived in Manhattan as I had toughened in Paris. He soon hit the streets looking for work. We both knew he could not function holding a steady job, but he took on any odd employment he could get. His most hated job was carting art to and from galleries. It irked him to labor on behalf of artists he felt to be inferior, but he was paid in cash. We put every extra cent in the back of a drawer to go toward our immediate goal—a larger room. It was the main reason we were so diligent paying our rent.

"Once you secured your room at the Chelsea, you weren't immediately kicked out if you got behind on the rent. But you did become part of the legion hiding from Mr. Bard. We wanted to establish ourselves as good tenants since we were on a waiting list for a bigger room on the second floor. I had seen my mother closing all the venetian blinds on many a sunny day, hiding from loan sharks and bill collectors throughout my childhood, and I had no desire to cower in the face of Stanley Bard. Mostly everybody owed Bard something. We owed him nothing. ...

"A week or two later I waltzed into the El Quixote. It was a bar-restaurant adjacent to the hotel, connected to the lobby by its own door, which made it feel like our bar, as it had been for decades. Dylan Thomas, Terry Southern, Eugene O'Neill, and Thomas Wolfe were among those who had raised one too many a glass there. I was wearing a long rayon navy dress with white polka dots and a straw hat, my East of Eden outfit. At the table to my left, Janis Joplin was holding court with her band. To my far right were Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, along with members of Country Joe and the Fish. At the last table facing the door was Jimi Hendrix, his head lowered, eating with his hat on, across from a blonde. There were musicians everywhere, sitting before tables laid with mounds of shrimp with green sauce, paella, pitchers of sangria, and bottles of tequila. I stood there amazed, yet I didn't feel like an intruder. The Chelsea was my home and the El Quixote my bar. There were no security guards, no pervasive sense of privilege. They were here for the Woodstock festival, but I was so afflicted by hotel oblivion that I wasn't aware of the festival or what it meant.

"Grace Slick got up and brushed past me. She was wearing a floor length tie-dyed dress and had dark violet eyes like Liz Taylor.

" 'Hello,' I said, noticing I was taller.

" 'Hello yourself,' she said.

"When I went back upstairs I felt an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people, though I had no way to interpret my feeling of prescience. I could never have predicted that I would one day walk in their path. At that moment I was still a gangly twenty-two-year-old book clerk, struggling simultaneously with several unfinished poems. On that night, too excited to sleep, infinite possibilities seemed to swirl above me. I stared up at the plaster ceiling as I had done as a child. It seemed to me that the vibrating patterns overhead were sliding into place."

delanceyplace.com 3/9/12 - the same date for different days

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - there are different calendars in use throughout the world today which result in different dates and years being ascribed to the same day. In 1616, the situation was significantly more diverse:

"On April 23, 1616, two literary giants, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, accomplished the feat of dying on the same date but different days. Mainly for the reason of their shared date of death, the United Nations named April 23 the International Day of the Book.

"Shakespeare, seven years the younger, went first, on Tuesday. Miguel de Cervantes, despite a life of hardship, held on another week and a half, until Saturday. This was possible because Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar proposed in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. Britain, however, recoiling at any whiff of papism, did not adopt the new calendar until 1752, and it lagged, in 1616, ten days behind. Although Shakespeare's death date is traditionally given as April 23, according to the new calendar he would have died on May 3.

"At that time there was as little agreement about when the year began as about what day it was. In many parts of Europe it had been traditional to consider a date such as Annunciation Day-the day nine months before Christmas when it was revealed to Mary that she would bear a child-as the beginning of the year; standardizing on January 1 was a newfangled notion based on an ancient tradition, the Roman consular year. The European states adopted the new date for the new year each in its time: Venice in 1512, Spain in 1556, France in 1564, Scotland in 1600, Russia in 1700, and so on. ...

"Matters become even more confounding when considering non-Western cultures. Some, like the Persians, who thought of the period we call 1616 as made up of parts of the years 994 and 995, celebrated the new year around the spring equinox. Others related the new year not just to the solar cycle but also to the phases of the moon: lunar new years were celebrated in East Asia, the Himalayas, and many parts of Southeast Asia. Some calendars reflected ancient histories: in China the year was 4252-4153; in the Maya long count it was probably 4730; in the Hebrew reckoning-in which the new year began in the fall-it was 5376-5377.

"All of which makes the study of a single calendar year an arbitrary and confused construct. It is not always certain which system a recorded date belongs to - historical documents give the impression that William III of England set sail from the Netherlands on November 11 and arrived in England on November 5. In some cases, more than one system was used at any given time: for many years both 'old style' (stilo vetere) and 'new style' (stilo novo) dates were in use in England. In East Asia, a year might be designated by a reign date or identified only by its associated zodiac animal, so that a reference to an event in the year of the dragon might point to 1616, or 1628, or some other year."

delanceyplace.com 3/8/12 - the pain of exclusion

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 09:17:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - our need to matter and our need to belong are as fundamental as our need to eat and breathe. Therefore ostracism—rejection, silence, exclusion—is one of the most powerful punishments that one person can inflict on another. Brain scans have shown that this rejection is actually experienced as physical pain, and that this pain is experienced whether those that reject us are close friends or family or total strangers, and whether the act is overt exclusion or merely looking away. Most typically, ostracism causes us to act to be included again—to belong again—although not necessarily with the same group:

"Studies reveal that even subtle, artificial or ostensibly unimportant exclusion can lead to strong emotional reactions. A strong reaction makes sense when your spouse's family or close circle of friends rejects or shuns you, because these people are important to you. It is more surprising that important instances of being barred are not necessary for intense feelings of rejection to emerge. We can feel awful even after people we have never met simply look the other way.

"This reaction serves a function: it warns us that something is wrong, that there exists a serious threat to our social and psychological well-being. Psychologists Roy Baumeister of Florida State University and Mark Leary of Duke University had argued in a 1995 article that belonging to a group was a need - not a desire or preference - and, when thwarted, leads to psychological and physical illness. Meanwhile other researchers have hypothesized that belonging, self-esteem, a sense of control over your life and a belief that existence is meaningful constitute four fundamental psychological needs that we must meet to function as social individuals. ...

"Ostracism uniquely threatens all these needs. Even in a verbal or physical altercation, individuals are still connected. Total exclusion, however, severs all bonds. Social rejection also deals a uniquely harsh blow to self-esteem, because it implies wrongdoing. Worse, the imposed silence forces us to ruminate, generating self-deprecating thoughts in our search for an explanation. The forced isolation also makes us feel helpless: you can fight back, but no one will respond. Finally, ostracism makes our very existence feel less meaningful because this type of rejection makes us feel invisible and unimportant. The magnitude of the emotional impact of ostracism even makes evolutionary sense. After all, social exclusion interferes not only with reproductive success but also with survival. People who do not belong are not included in collaborations necessary to obtain and share food and also lack protection against enemies.

"In fact, the emotional fallout is so poignant that the brain registers it as physical pain. ... As soon as [we begin] to feel ostracized, [brain] scanners register a flurry of activity in [our] dorsal anterior cingulate cortex - a brain region associated with the emotional aspects of physical pain. ...

"For most people, ostracism usually engenders a concerted effort to be included again, though not necessarily by the group that shunned us. We do this by agreeing with, mimicking, obeying or cooperating with others. In our 2000 study, for example, Cheung and Choi asked participants to perform a perceptual task in which they had to memorize a simple shape such as a triangle and correctly identify the shape within a more complex figure. Before they made their decision, we flashed the supposed answers of other participants on the screen. Those who had been previously ostracized ... were more likely than included players to give the same answers as the majority of participants, even though the majority was always wrong. Those who had been excluded wanted to fit in, even if that meant ignoring their own better judgment.

"Although personality seems to have no influence on our immediate reactions to ostracism, character traits do affect how quickly we recover from it and how we cope with the experience. ... People who are socially anxious tend to ruminate or are prone to depression take longer to recover from ostracism than other people do."

delanceyplace.com 3/6/12 - robert fulton goes bankrupt

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Robert Fulton, the first American to operate a steamboat, went bankrupt when he lost his monopoly in a landmark Supreme Court ruling, which resulted in competition from innovative competitors like young Cornelius Vanderbilt. Prices dropped so low that a newspaper quipped - walking was more expensive than traveling on the Vanderbilt line:

"Every schoolchild is taught that Robert Fulton was the first American to build and operate a steamboat on New York waters. When his Clermont sauntered four miles per hour upstream on the Hudson River in 1807, Fulton opened up new possibilities in transportation, marketing, and city building. What is not often taught about Fulton is that he had a monopoly enforced by the state. The New York legislature gave Fulton the privilege of carrying all steamboat traffic in New York for thirty years. It was this monopoly that Thomas Gibbons, a New Jersey steamboat man, tried to crack when he hired young Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1817 to run steamboats in New York by charging less than the monopoly rates.

"Vanderbilt was a classic market entrepreneur, and he was intrigued by the challenge of breaking the Fulton monopoly. On the mast of Gibbon's ship Vanderbilt hoisted a flag that read: 'New Jersey must be free.' For sixty days in 1817, Vanderbilt defied capture as he raced passengers cheaply from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to New York City. He became a popular figure on the Atlantic as he lowered the fares and eluded the law. Finally, in 1824, in the landmark case of Gibbons v. Ogden, the Supreme Court struck down the Fulton monopoly. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that only the federal government, not the states, could regulate interstate commerce. This extremely popular decision opened the waters of America to complete competition. A jubilant Vanderbilt was greeted in New Brunswick, New Jersey, by cannon salutes fired by 'citizens desirous of testifying in a public manner their good will.' Ecstatic New Yorkers immediately launched two steamboats named for John Marshall. On the Ohio River, steamboat traffic doubled in the first year after Gibbons v. Ogden and quadrupled after the second year.

"The triumph of market entrepreneurs in steamboating led to improvements in technology. As one man observed, 'The boat builders, freed from the domination of the Fulton-Livingston interests, were quick to develop new ideas that before had no encouragement from capital.' These new ideas included tubular boilers to replace the heavy and expensive copper boilers Fulton used. Cord wood for fuel was also a major cost for Fulton, but innovators soon found that anthracite coal worked well under the new tubular boilers, so 'the expense of fuel was cut down one-half.'

"The real value of removing the Fulton monopoly was that the costs of steamboating dropped. Passenger traffic, for example, from New York City to Albany immediately dropped from seven to three dollars after Gibbons v. Ogden. Fulton's group couldn't meet the new rates and soon went bankrupt. Gibbons and Vanderbilt, meanwhile, adopted the new technology, cut their costs, and earned $40,000 profit each year during the late 1820s.

"With such an open environment for market entrepreneurs, Vanderbilt decided to quit his pleasant association with Gibbons, buy two steamboats, and go into business for himself. During the 1830s, Vanderbilt would establish trade routes all over the northeast. He offered fast and reliable service at low rates. He first tried the New York to Philadelphia route and forced the 'standard' three-dollar fare down to one dollar. On the New Brunswick to New York City run, Vanderbilt charged six cents a trip and provided free meals. As Niles' Register said, the 'times must be hard indeed when a traveler who wishes to save money cannot afford to walk.' "

delanceyplace.com 3/6/12 - muddy waters and willie dixon

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in the 1930s and 1940s, the great diaspora of poor Americans from the south to the cities of the North and West brought the blues of young, musically ferocious guitarists like B.B. King and Muddy Waters from Mississippi to cities like Memphis and Chicago. With that move came a transition from acoustic to electric guitar, and a sound that formed the muscular roots of rock and roll:

"In 1943, four years before B.B. King departed the Delta, a young singer/guitarist named McKinley Morganfield headed for Chicago after a 1941 field recording session with Alan Lomax, which resulted in a second session the following year. Like B.B. and Howlin' Wolf, Morganfield also had a nickname: Muddy Waters was the tag his grandmother had given him as a child growing up on the Stovall Plantation, just outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. Waters believed his chances of becoming a commercial recording artist were better up north than in Mississippi or even Memphis, so he joined the black movement out of the South, arriving in Chicago determined to make his blues mark.

"It didn't take long. A singer with a rough-hewn voice that belied his youth, Waters also played a mean, slashing guitar that was at once angry and arrogant. His chords and bottleneck slide-guitar riffs were direct descendants of the sounds he heard from Son House, Willie Brown, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and other first-generation Delta bluesmen. Yet, something in Muddy Waters's delivery was new and refreshing, something that came from the past but was now clearly lodged in the blues present - and future.

"It was one thing for Muddy Waters ... to play house-rent parties and the occasional club with his acoustic guitar as accompaniment. It was clearly another when Waters got hold of an electric guitar and began playing with a band. What resulted made American blues history: the true transformation of the music, from a singular, lonely rural sound to a lively urban one that filled dance floors in South Side clubs, that ripped the heart out of any blues sentimentality that might have been wafting in the air, and that opened the door to a brand-new blues sound. In time, Muddy's blues redefined the music in contemporary terms, helping to give birth to rock & roll in the early Fifties, to inspire countless young British guitarists to play the blues in the early Sixties, to keep the blues alive in the Seventies—one of its leanest decades—and to forever change the face of American music, since no pop or roots form could escape the blues' reach for long. ...

"His recording career really got going the following year, when blues pianist Sunnyland Slim arranged for Waters to record for Leonard and Phil Chess, two Jewish immigrant brothers who had recently started a record company called Aristocrat, which later became Chess. ...

"And then there was Willie Dixon, who often played bass behind Waters. A big, round man with a warm heart and a comforting smile, Dixon also had the best ears in the blues business. Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Dixon came to Chicago in 1936 and pursued a career as a professional boxer before turning to music full time. ... A superb songwriter, Dixon supplied Waters with the material that became his biggest Chess hits, including the 1954 landmark number 'Hoochie Coochie Man.' "

delanceyplace.com 3/5/12 - monstrous popes and cardinals

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in the 2000 year history of the Catholic church, there have been many pious cardinals and popes. But others were void of piety. They used their vast wealth and power to more diabolical ends. Among those were Pope Alexander VI (1431-1503) and his son, the Cardinal and Duke of Valentinois Cesare Borgia (1476-1507):

"The last four years of Alexander's pontificate were taken up largely with his and Cesare Borgia's ambition to appropriate the Papal States and to turn them into a Borgia family fief. The program was mapped out and put into execution by Cesare, who by now utterly dominated his father. It involved the crushing of many of the great Roman families, above all the Orsini; it necessitated several assassinations, which were normally followed by seizures of property; and it was further financed by the open sale of the highest offices of the Church, including that of cardinal. Cesare Borgia was hated and feared for his violence and cruelty. 'Every night,' the Venetian ambassador reported to his government, 'four or five men are discovered assassinated, bishops, prelates and others, so that all Rome trembles for fear of being murdered by the duke.'

"Yet, although he was hideously disfigured by syphilis—toward the end of his life he never showed himself in public without a mask—few who came in contact with Cesare failed to be impressed. His energy was boundless, his courage absolute. He appeared to need no sleep, and his speed of movement was astonishing: he was said to arrive at one city before he had left the last. At the same time he shared to the full his father's love of women. In his short life—he was to die in battle in Navarre, at the age of thirty-one—he left at least eleven bastards; and the diary of the papal master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchard, leaves us in no doubt of how he spent his leisure:

" 'On Sunday evening, October 30 [1501]. Don Cesare Borgia gave a supper in his apartments in the apostolic palace, with fifty decent prostitutes or courtesans in attendance, who, after the meal, danced with the servants and others there, first fully dressed and then naked. Following the supper, too, lampstands holding lighted candles were placed on the floor and chestnuts strewn about, which the prostitutes, naked and on their hands and knees, had to pick up as they crawled in and out among the lampstands. The Pope, Don Cesare, and Donna Lucrezia were all present to watch. Finally prizes were offered—silken doublets, pairs of shoes, hats, and other garments—for those men who could perform the act most frequently with the prostitutes.' "

delanceyplace.com 3/2/12 - a hundred-mile wall is built in berlin

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the Berlin Wall. In 1945, the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, and the French divided Germany into four Zones of Occupation and its capital, Berlin, into four Sectors. Given Germany's war-prone past, the Allies were determined not to let it reunify and return as a power on the world stage. "West" Germany of the U.S., Britain and France experienced vibrant growth, while "East" Germany of the Soviet Union fell far behind - leading to a mass exodus of the brightest East Germans to West Germany, primarily across the porous borders of Berlin:

"Until 1961, ... Berlin represented a dangerous anomaly from the East's point of view. Though a hundred miles inside East Germany, and surrounded by Soviet and East German forces, it remained under joint four-power Allied occupation and kept a special status, still more or less one city, in which fairly free movement was possible. Its porous boundaries represented a hole, an 'escape hatch' through which enterprising East Germans could head to the by-now booming West in pursuit of political freedom and a higher standard of living than their neo-Stalinist masters were prepared to allow them.

"Between 1945 and 1961, some two and a half million fled in this way, reducing [East Germany]'s population by around 15 per cent. Ominously for the Communist regime, most emigrants were young and well qualified. The country was losing the cream of its educated professionals and skilled workers at a rate that risked making the Communist state totally unviable. During the summer of 1961, this exodus reached critical levels. Every day, thousands of East Germans slipped into West Berlin and from there were flown to West Germany itself along the so-called 'air corridors'. The regime was not prepared to abandon the political and economic restrictions that fueled the haemorrhaging of its brightest and best. Hence, on that fateful August week- end, the Communists' vast undertaking to seal off East from West Berlin, to close the 'escape hatch'.

"Since the end of the war, Berlin had been a constant, running sore in East- West relations. In 1948-9 Stalin had tried to blockade the Western-occupied sectors into submission by closing off all the land routes into the city. The West surprised him with a successful airlift that kept their sectors supplied with sufficient essentials to survive. After a little under a year of siege, the Russian leader gave up. However, only Stalin's death prevented a wall, or something very much like it, being constructed through Berlin in 1953. In 1958, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, every bit as aware of the city's precarious position, started threatening West Berlin's status once more. The ebullient, unpredictable Soviet leader compared the Allied-occupied sectors to the West's tenderest parts. If, Khrushchev joked, he wanted to cause NATO pain, all he had to do was squeeze....

"And on Sunday 13 August, Khrushchev squeezed. The day became known as 'Stacheldrahtsonntag' (Barbed-Wire Sunday). Within a few weeks this improvised wire obstacle started to morph into a formidable cement one, a heavily fortified, guarded, and booby-trapped barrier dividing the city and enclosing West Berlin.

"The Wall shocked and amazed the world, a massive engineering and security project that before it was built many outsiders had dismissed as impossible. It extended for almost a hundred miles, with thirty or so of it dividing East from West Berlin, the rest sealing off the surrounding East German countryside. It was overseen by 300 watchtowers, manned by guards with orders to shoot to kill. The 'no man's land' between East and West was littered with lethal obstacles, alarms, and self-activating searchlights, with an eleven-foot-high clamber-proofed slab fence representing the final, on its own near-insuperable obstacle. The structure would soon become notorious even in the farthest, darkest corners of the earth as the 'Berlin Wall'."

delanceyplace.com 3/1/12 - the law required prostitutes to wear high heels

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - in the 1400s, the height of the Renaissance in Florence—the time of Cosimo de' Medici, Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci and countless other guiding lights—prostitutes were required by law to wear high heels and bells on their heads, widespread homosexuality was blamed for defeat in battle, and criminals had to be imported from other cities to satisfy the people's insatiable demand for public executions:

"[After the Florentines' military defeat at Lucca] a familiar scapegoat was used to explain the Florentines' ineptness in battle: homosexuality. For years clergymen such as the Franciscan firebrand Bernardino of Siena had been raging from the pulpit that the crime of sodomy was destroying the city. So famous was Florence for homosexual activity that during the fourteenth century the German slang for 'sodomite' was Florenzer. In 1432 the government took steps to curtail this perceived root of its troubles on the battlefield by establishing an agency to identify and prosecute homosexuals, the Ufficiali di Notte, 'Office of the Night' (a name made even more colorful by the fact that notte was slang for 'bugger'). ... A less official method of detecting homosexuals was for mothers to rattle their sons' coin bags: if the coins exclaimed, 'fire fire fire' the money was said to be the gift of a sodomite.

"This vice squad worked in tandem with the Orwellian-sounding Ufficiali dell'Onesta 'Office of Decency,' which was charged with licensing and administering the municipal brothels that had been created in the area around the Mercato Vecchio. The specific aim of these public brothels was to wean Florentine men from the 'greater evil' of sodomy. Prostitutes became a common sight in Florence, not least because the law required them to wear distinctive garb: gloves, high-heeled shoes, and a bell on the head. ...

"Held ... in Florence's communal prison the Stinche ... were more serious criminals—heretics, sorcerers, witches and murderers—for whom unpleasant fates awaited: decapitation, amputation or burning at the stake. Executions took place outside the walls, in the Prato della Giustizia, 'Field of Justice.' These were popular public spectacles—so popular, in fact, that criminals often had to be imported from other cities to satisfy the public's demand for macabre drama."

delanceyplace.com 2/28/12 - santa anna is hailed in washington, d.c.

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in 1836, Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and his army massacred "Texians" at the Alamo and at Goliad. Yet since one of the reasons Texans had sought independence from Mexico was Mexico's prohibition of slavery, when Santa Anna appeared in Washington, D.C. shortly thereafter, he was hailed by some Northerners as a crusader who had taken on slaveholders. In fact, the first order of business of the newly independent Republic of Texas was to approve annexation to the United States, but the United States rejected this overture from Texas because of its slaveholding status. The U.S. did not approve the Texas petition for statehood until 1845 as part of one of the elaborate compromises on slavery that preceded the Civil War:

"On October 18, 1836, the Speaker of the House of Representatives declared Sam Houston to be the 'duly and constitutionally elected president of the Republic of Texas, and Mirabeau B. Lamar Vice President for the term of two years, immediately ensuing from the second Monday in December.' In this first national election in September 1836, the people were also asked to vote on a resolution for annexation to the United States of America. It was overwhelmingly passed by the citizens of Texas, most of whom had emigrated from the U.S. Still reeling from unmitigated criticism, David G. Burnet was relieved to hand over the reins of government to the hero of [the Battle of] San Jacinto. On October 22, 1836, Sam Houston was inaugurated in the small wooden capitol building in Columbia as the first elected President of the Republic of Texas.

"The former Governor of Tennessee had his hands full as a myriad of difficult domestic and diplomatic tasks lay before him, including annexation to the United States, making peace with the Indians, negotiating with Mexico, and an empty treasury. Houston judged the accommodations at Columbia to be wholly inadequate and immediately lobbied for the seat of government to be moved to his namesake town of Houston. The muddy little town had been laid out less than two months before by the Allen brothers at the confluence of Buffalo and White Oak Bayous, several miles upstream from the former site of Harrisburg.

"One of the newly elected President's most puzzling dilemmas after his inauguration was what to do with Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the Mexican President who was still being held as a prisoner in Brazoria. Santa Anna had written to Houston offering his assistance to negotiate with the United States for its annexation of Texas. Houston dismissed his offer as insincere but was determined to get the infamous prisoner out of Texas. Santa Anna was released through diplomatic channels to Washington, D.C., where he managed to charm the Washington elite. He was hailed by the abolitionists as a crusader who had taken on the breakaway slave-holding Republic, rather than the man who had ordered the massacres of Texians at the Alamo and at Goliad. Houston rationalized, 'Restored to his own country [Santa Anna] would keep Mexico in commotion for years, and Texas will be safe.' With the treaties of Velasco [signed after San Jacinto and intended, on the part of the Texans, to provide a conclusion of hostilities between the two belligerents] violated by both governments, Texas independence was not recognized by Mexico and her boundary was not determined until after the U.S. and Mexican War with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848."

delanceyplace.com 2/28/12 - emily post's etiquette debuts in the raucous jazz age

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Emily Post's landmark book, Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, debuted during the raucous flouting of morals and conventions known as the Jazz Age. Yet the book immediately became an overwhelming best-seller, as it codified anew the eternal idea that how you treat others matters:

"Emily Post witnessed Reconstruction and Jim Crow, as well as the emergence of Martin Luther King. Her youth was shaped by the high Victorian era, cosseted by the Gilded Age, and then tossed about in the restless years culminating in World War I. Through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II and its domestic aftermath (all revolutions of a sort), Emily Post's Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home - magisterial, impatient, collegial, and neighborly - would outlast the ages it reflected and corrected.

"When it debuted in 1922, Etiquette represented a fifty-year-old woman at her wisest and a country at its wildest. The preternaturally confident author had her feet firmly planted in the Jazz Age, taking its thoughtful measure in her meticulous way. What Emily initially called her 'little blue book' debuted in a Manhattan society intrigued by the Algonquin's Round Table, where Harold Ross, editor of a new, quickly influential weekly, the New Yorker, held court with a whiskey in hand. Even as sales skyrocketed for Emily Post's guide to the good but proper life, the same decade would also nurture Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway, Claudette Colbert and Clara Bow, George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong. Etiquette assumed its position within the heady cultural milieu of the 1920s, shaped by the era of its birth even while modifying it.

"At its broadest, etiquette - the measure of how we treat one another - reaches across class, race, gender, and culture. For many women, particularly (and through their transmission to their sons and husbands), Etiquette long fashioned our country's idea and ideal of what it was to pursue a gracious - possibly even a moral - life. Attention to behavior, after all, preoccupied the founders of our nation. Sixteen-year-old George Washington had written his pamphlet Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation; A Book of Etiquette believing that everything he already knew about getting on in life was worth sharing with others.

"Though never a head of state, Emily Post didn't lack for recognition. In 1976 and again in 1990, Life magazine would laud her as one of the most important Americans of the twentieth century. Etiquette, by the 1930s having sold over a million copies, would continue to be touted in the most unlikely moments and places. The list of extravagant citations the book has received in the past few years alone includes admirers as disparate as P. J. O'Rourke, reminiscing about learning how to fit into society through Emily's book; Joan Didion, using Etiquette to confront her grief over her spouse's death; and Tim Page, a Washington Post music critic, discovering that Etiquette could help him cope with Asperger's syndrome. ...

"How could the promise that etiquette bestows be maintained throughout the [tumultuous] twentieth century? How, in the face of massive human and natural evils, could Americans believe that considerate social intercourse remained a significant issue? That politesse mattered? If misleadingly superficial at first glance, however, the lady's solution holds up after all. Emily Post was not alone in maintaining that the art of treating people well is the other side to the act of waging war."

delanceyplace.com 2/27/12 - joe mccarthy and the kennedys

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:54:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - we all know the popular image of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy—swarthy, foreboding and drunk—making bombastic accusations during his 1950s anti-Communist crusade. Yet early in his senate career, he was clumsy-but-likeable and always available to do favors for his business backers. So it was that Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father to John Kennedy and always eager to bend Washington legislation to his favor, befriended the young senator. And thus we find young Senator McCarthy as a guest at the Kennedy compound, playing football with the Kennedy sons and dating the Kennedy daughters:

"What exactly the Kennedys expected from their farmboy prodigy makes for interesting speculation. 'I like Joe McCarthy,' the Ambassador was frank to admit later. 'I would see him when I went down to Washington, and when he was visiting in Palm Beach he'd come around to my house for a drink. I invited him to Cape Cod.'

"At least at first 'I thought he'd be a sensation.' But McCarthy overdid things, and often during weekends with the family his gusto and willingness to play along left him a setup for the raucous Kennedy lifestyle, a figure of fun. ...

"McCarthy got bounced around. He cracked a rib playing touch football; after four quick errors at shortstop they threw him out of a softball game to shamble up the lawn, humiliated, and watch from the porch. His performance in the water was worse. 'They gave him the boat treatment,' Rose wrote Bobby Kennedy in 1950, 'i.e., throwing him out of the boat, and then Eunice, in her usual girlish glee, pushed him under. To everybody's concern and astonishment, the Senator came up with a ghastly look on his face, puffing and paddling. The wonder of it all was that he did not drown on the spot because, you see, coming from Wisconsin he had never learned to swim. . . . However,' Rose concluded, 'I am sure they will never try anything like that on him again, although you can never tell.'

"Another weekend, 'he went out on my boat,' the Ambassador would remember, and 'almost drowned swimming behind it but he never complained.' McCarthy was 'always pleasant, he was never a crab.' At least, never to them. Another time, McCarthy got tangled in the painter of a sailboat; Jack dove in to try to save him. To one friend, after a particularly hectic weekend, McCarthy let a little of it out: 'Christ, I came up there to rest!'

"McCarthy amused [Kennedy daughter] Eunice—he was like junk food after the restrictive Kennedy diet—who dated him a few times, quite seriously at first. His personal tastes were simple throughout those bachelor years: a fast lay before he got too sloshed, often atop the bedroom coats. Eunice was a little too delicate for anything like that, so high-strung as an insomniac teenager that houseguests were alerted not to flush the toilet at night for fear of waking her up. Before long Eunice moved on to R. Sargent Shriver, a high-minded Newsweek editor who started out advising Joe Kennedy as to the publishability of Joe Junior's letters from Europe, then went on salary to consult with Eunice and help manage the Merchandise Mart. When they were married in 1953, McCarthy presented the couple with a silver cigarette box, inscribed 'To Eunice and Bob, from one who lost.' Meanwhile, McCarthy consoled himself with sisters Pat and Jean Kennedy. Jean remembered Joe's line of anti-Communist small talk, after which he 'kissed very hard.'

"By then the old financier [Joe Kennedy] was calling, more often than McCarthy really liked, usually for a favor. 'Remind me to check the size of his campaign contribution,' McCarthy scrawled on a note to Roy Cohn during one conversation. 'I'm not sure it's worth it.' Other backers, less well known and far less demanding, were attracted now to McCarthy's noisy crusade."

delanceyplace.com 2/24/12 - how to be a great publicist

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - a very young Frank Sinatra already had the teenage girls screaming and swooning at his concerts when, in 1943, he hired the best publicist in show business - George Evans. Evans saw that the crowds were hysterical, but not choreographed to his liking - so he took it upon himself to take Sinatra's crowds to a new level:

"[After watching his new client perform in four consecutive shows at the Paramount Theater], publicist George Evans noticed - because each audience, after all, is a different animal - that not every show was successfully hysterical. Sometimes there were odd lulls in the tumult; sometimes the crowd got in its own way (and the singer's), just screaming, creating a massive wall of sound, preventing Sinatra from doing what he did best: singing. Pandemonium was all well and good if it served the purpose at hand -- namely, making this boy a star like no other before him. ...

"George would have to be ... skillful in working his new client. He had read how farmers would pay a pilot to go up and scatter certain chemicals on clouds to end a drought - seeding the clouds, they called it. Well, if clouds could be seeded, why not crowds? Rumor had it that [Sinatra's former publicist] Milt Rubin had handed out half-dollars in the Paramount lobby to girls who promised to make a racket during Sinatra's shows. It was the right idea, Evans felt, but unscientific in approach. ...

" 'George was a genius,' said Jerry Lewis, who, along with his partner, Dean Martin, was represented by Evans in the late 1940s. 'He would audition girls for how loud they could scream! Then he would give each of them a five-dollar bill - no dirty money, just clean new bills; I learned that from him. The agreement was that they had to stay at least five shows. Then he spread them through the Paramount - seven sections. Evans would read the scores of the songs to see where the screaming should come in - the girls could only scream on the high, loud parts, never when it was low and sexy.'

"The publicist would even take groups of girls to the basement to rehearse them, giving them precise cues when to yell 'Oh, Frankie! Oh, Frankie!' - not just during the loud parts, but whenever Sinatra let his voice catch. Evans also coached the singer. Picking up on Sinatra's intimate relationship with the microphone, Evans told him: Imagine that mike on its stand is a beautiful broad. Caress it. Make love to it. Hold on to it for dear life.

"Sinatra looked impressed: the guy was good. ...

"The publicist even trained both the singer and his claques in the art of call-and-response. When Sinatra sang '(I Got a Woman Crazy for Me) She's Funny That Way,' with the lyric 'I'm not much to look at, nothin' to see,' Evans coached one of the girls to yell 'Oh, Frankie, yes, you are!' On 'Embraceable You,' Evans told Frank to spread his arms beckoningly on the words 'Come to papa, come to papa, do.' The girls could then scream, 'Oh, Daddy!' After which, Frank would murmur into the mike, 'Gee, that's a lot of kids for one fellow.' Evans trained some of the girls to faint in the aisles, others to moan loudly in unison. He hired an ambulance to park outside the theater and issued the ushers bottles of ammonia 'in case a patron feels like swooning.' "

delanceyplace.com 2/23/12 - intolerance toward catholics

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in colonial America, even with the establishment of Protestant colonies, the King's official Anglican church and the various Protestant churches had an antagonistic coexistent that flared up as one of the key causes of the American Revolution. As late as the 1770s, Henry Clay's Baptist father had been arrested and jailed in Virginia for pastoring a non-Anglican church. Given this enmity among non-Catholic churches, it is no surprise that colonial-era Catholics were not allowed to worship freely in most colonies. Against this intolerance, Catholic missionaries came in the early 1700s to try and proselytize within the colonies. Even in Pennsylvania, a bastion of tolerance and religious freedom established by the Quaker William Penn, Catholics had to exercise significant caution in their practices:

"At the corner of Willings Alley and Fourth Street [in Philadelphia] stood Old St. Joseph's Church, one of the few places in the American colonies where Roman Catholics could worship freely. British people on both sides of the Atlantic were prejudiced against Catholics in the eighteenth century. Henry VIII's break with the Church of Rome in the 1520s and his Roman Catholic daughter Mary's persecution of Protestants was a common theme in their collective memory. Colonists also identified Catholicism with the wars that had pitted French Canadian and English colonists against one another for decades. But Roman Catholic missionaries had reportedly come to Philadelphia as early as 1708, and Father Joseph Greaton, an English priest, had arrived in 1720 or 1721. Construction on the church began in 1733.

"Not everyone was thrilled with the news that a Roman Catholic parish was to be located in Philadelphia. On July 25, 1734, Lieutenant Governor Patrick Gordon told the Provincial Council:

'he was under no small Concern to hear that a House lately built in Walnut Street, in this City, had been set apart for the Exercise of the Roman Catholick Religion, and is commonly called the Romish Chappell, where several Persons, he understands, resort on Sundays, to hear Mass openly celebrated by a Popish Priest; that he conceives the tolerating the Publick Exercise of that Religion to be contrary to the Laws of England . . .

"William Penn's religious toleration won out, and the 'Romish Chappell' - St. Joseph's Church - became a part of the religious fabric of Philadelphia. ...

"Construction of a second Catholic chapel in Philadelphia [beginning in 1763] reflects the increasingly diverse population in the city by the second half of the eighteenth century. Two hundred and twenty-two people subscribed to the construction of the new church. The majority were Irish, along with thirty Germans and fifteen French. ...

"Both St. Joseph's and St. Mary's churches bowed to the reality that many colonists were prejudiced against Catholics, and both structures kept a low profile. The small building that housed St. Joseph's, which was razed in the 1830s and replaced by the current church, had "more the appearance of a stable than of a church," Father Adam Marshall mused. Fearing attacks by anti-Catholic mobs, St. Mary's early parishioners built their church entrance facing Fifth Street, with the burial ground separating it from the street."

delanceyplace.com 2/22/12 - james madison reads 400 books

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - James Madison (1751-1836), our fourth President, may have been the most qualified man to ever assume the U.S. presidency. He is said to have read over four hundred books in a single year in preparation for helping design the miracle of self-government contained in the U.S. Constitution:

"James Madison had come to the presidency uniquely prepared to manage the mechanics of government. Born on his father's plantation in Orange County, Madison, unlike many of his Virginia peers, attended the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton). He followed in the footsteps of a favorite tutor, then returned after graduation to help manage the family plantation. He left again to help draft the Virginia constitution in 1776, then became the youngest delegate in Philadelphia, aged twenty-nine, at the Continental Congress in 1779.

"Although he served four sessions in the Virginia House of Delegates in Richmond following the Revolution (1784 and after), Madison's chief labor of the mid-1780s had been a self-assigned research project. Closeted in the second-floor library in his father's house, he spent countless hours reading widely on the topic of government (one year he read four hundred books). His syllabus, which included many volumes sent to him by his friend Jefferson from Paris, approached the subject from a mix of historical and theoretical perspectives, studying modern and ancient models. But Madison's investiga- tions were more than an intellectual exercise. As a son of the Enlightenment, Madison believed such a disciplined survey might produce a plan whereby man could control his destiny. He was looking, in short, for political solutions to self-government.

"A new approach was required, he believed, because of what he termed the 'imbecility' of the Articles of Confederation [the document that governed the relationship of the thirteen states during and after the American Revolution], which, having granted the central government few powers, left the nation unable to levy taxes, negotiate with foreign powers, or manage its economy. Madison was readying himself for an opportunity he soon facilitated, namely, the gathering of twelve states for a 'Grand Convention.' He and fifty-four other delegates spent seventeen weeks in Philadelphia in 1787, hammering out a new governing document for the nation, the U.S. Constitution.

"After its 1788 ratification - which Madison helped accomplish as a co-writer (with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) of the essays collectively known as The Federalist Papers - Madison was elected to the House of Representatives. There, as President George Washington's most trusted ally in Congress, Congressman Madison guided the passage of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, colloquially known as the Bill of Rights. During his four terms in Congress, the never-married Madison, at forty-three, also met a young widow, Dolley Payne Todd, who, in 1794, became his wife [and became one of the most beloved First Ladies in American history]."

delanceyplace.com 2/21/12 - before seat belts formula one drivers had a 33% chance of surviving

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the early days of Formula One racing, before roll bars and seat belts, drivers had in the estimate of some only a 33 percent chance of surviving. In fact, between 1957 and 1961 twenty Grand Prix drivers died and many more suffered terrible injuries. In 1961, Ferrari drivers Phil Hill and Baron Von Trips battled for the Formula 1 Championship, which culminated in the Italian Grand Prix in Monza, Italy on a racetrack so perilous that the British team had boycotted it a year earlier:

"They began arriving a day in advance. The loyal Ferrari following - the tifosi - rolled up in caravans of Fiats and battered motorbikes to camp among the chestnut groves that spread more than six hundred acres around the boomerang shaped racetrack in Monza, Italy. By the glow of evening campfires they raised cups of grappa to the great drivers, the piloti who once thundered around the terrible banked turns of the Autodromo Nazionale looming at the edge of the woods like a concrete cathedral.

"Most of those piloti were gone now. Between 1957 and 1961 twenty Grand Prix drivers died. Many more suffered terrible injuries. By some estimates, drivers had a 33 percent chance of surviving. In the days before seat belts and roll bars, they were crushed, burned, and beheaded with unnerving regularity. One driver retired after winning the championship only to die three months later in an ordinary car accident near his home.

"The survivors raced on, in spite of the ominously long death roll. Inside the autodromo half a dozen teams and thirty-two drivers warmed up for the 267-mile Italian Grand Prix, the climactic race of the 1961 season, with the spotlight focused squarely on Ferrari teammates Phil Hill and Count Wolfgang von Trips.. ...

"The location only heightened the suspense. The Italians called Monza the Death Circuit, in part because the banked turns catapulted errant cars like cannonballs. The sloped surface was coarse and pockmarked, and it exerted a centrifugal pull the fragile Formula I cars were not designed to handle. ... More dangerous still, the long straights allowed drivers to touch 180 mph, and to slipstream inches apart. A series of tight curves, known as chicanes, had been installed to slow the cars, but it was still a track to be driven flat out. As much as any racetrack in the world, it conjured racing's heroics and horrors. To the north, it curved into a silent forest that was haunted by its many victims (or so went the legend). "

delanceyplace.com 2/20/12 - even george washington was vilified

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - a reminder on President's Day - even George Washington faced protests and vilification during his time in office. In the waning days of his presidency, George Washington was vilified for his support of the Jay Treaty. One newspaper editor even called for "a speedy death to General Washington." Though the treaty averted war, solved many issues left over from the American Revolution, and opened ten years of largely peaceful trade in the midst of the French Revolutionary Wars, it was reviled because it favored America's former enemy Britain and failed to end to the impressment of American sailors. So Washington and other treaty supporters became despised by much of the public, with countless angry demonstrations - including one where his own house was surrounded for days by hostile chanting protesters:

"When the president dined alone with John Adams to enlist his support [for the Jay treaty], his vice president worried 'I see nothing but a dissolution of government and immediate war.' ... The press denounced Jay, criticized the treaty derided the Senate, and in a constant drumbeat reserved some of its most trenchant words for Washington himself. One Virginia editor actually suggested a toast for a 'speedy death to General Washington.' Meanwhile when the press wasn't sticking its finger in Washington's eye, popular meetings were. Across the country - in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and countless other cities - they screeched until their voices were hoarse for Washington to reject the treaty, while in Manhattan seven thousand Republicans stretching from Broad Street to Wall Street noisily marched against it. And day after day letters poured in, condemning the pact as a deal with the British 'Satan.'

"Then the opposition truly got ugly. Jay's treaty and his effigy were burned up and down the entire Eastern Seaboard. Rioters in Philadelphia clogging the avenues broke windows in the houses of the British ambassador and a Federalist senator. In New York, Alexander Hamilton was pelted with stones. And John Adams was stunned to see the presidential mansion surrounded from morning to evening by protesters repeating the same stinging calls, a deafening refrain chanted over and over again in an ever-escalating crescendo, demanding war with England, cursing Washington (a 'horrid blasphemer') and calling for the success of the French patriots; marchers even impaled the treaty on a pole and carried it to the home of the French ambassador. The vitriol was unrelenting: A pale and utterly depleted Washington was [even] compared unfavorably to King Louis XVI."

delanceyplace.com 2/17/12 - the graveyards of china

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Pearl Buck (nee Pearl Sydenstricker, 1892 - 1973), the daughter of American missionaries in China, gained world renown in the 1930s with her novels of China, including The Good Earth and A House Divided. In the China of her youth, death was everywhere. She became accustomed to death from the omnipresent graves - which were a result of the veneration of ancestors; the rampant malaria, dysentery, and cholera; and the roving soldiers of warlord armies:

"Pearl Sydenstricker's older sisters, Maude and Edith, and her brother Arthur had all died young in the course of six years from dysentery, cholera, and malaria, respectively. Edgar, the oldest, ten years of age when Pearl was born, stayed long enough to teach her to walk, but a year or two later he was gone too (sent back to be educated in the United States, he would be a young man of twenty before his sister saw him again). He left behind a new baby brother to take his place, and when she needed company of her own age, Pearl peopled the house with her dead siblings. 'These three who came before I was born, and went away too soon, somehow seemed alive to me,' she said.

"Every Chinese family had its own quarrelsome, mischievous ghosts who could be appealed to, appeased, or comforted with paper people, houses, and toys. As a small child lying awake in bed at night, Pearl grew up listening to the cries of women on the street outside calling back the spirits of their dead or dying babies. ...

"She was an enthusiastic participant in local funerals on the hill outside the walled compound of her parents' house: large, noisy, convivial affairs where everyone had a good time. Pearl joined in as soon as the party got going with people killing cocks, burning paper money, and gossiping about foreigners making malaria pills out of babies' eyes. ...

"She was baffled by a newly arrived American, one of her parents' visitors, who complained that the Sydenstrickers lived in a graveyard. ('That huge empire is one mighty cemetery,' Mark Twain wrote of China, 'ridged and wrinkled from its center to its circumference with graves.') Ancestors and their coffins were part of the landscape of Pearl's childhood. The big heavy wooden coffins that stood ready for their occupants in her friends' houses, or lay awaiting burial for weeks or months in the fields and along the canal banks, were a source of pride and satisfaction to farmers whose families had for centuries poured their sweat, their waste, and their dead bodies back into the same patch of soil.

"Sometimes Pearl found bones lying in the grass, fragments of limbs, mutilated hands, once a head and shoulder with parts of an arm still attached. They were so tiny she knew they belonged to dead babies, nearly always girls suffocated or strangled at birth and left out for dogs to devour. It never occurred to her to say anything to anybody. Instead she controlled her revulsion and buried what she found according to rites of her own invention, poking the grim shreds and scraps into cracks in existing graves or scratching new ones out of the ground. Where other little girls constructed mud pies, Pearl made miniature grave mounds, patting down the sides and decorating them with flowers or pebbles. She carried a string bag for collecting human remains, and a sharpened stick or a club made from split bamboo with a stone fixed into it to drive the dogs away She could never tell her mother why she hated packs of scavenging dogs, any more than she could explain her compulsion, acquired early from Chinese friends, to run away and hide whenever she saw a soldier coming down the road."

delanceyplace.com 2/16/12 - the forced deportation of germans

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - at the end of World War II, millions of people of German heritage were forcibly deported to Germany from other European countries where they and their forbearers had long lived. This was part of an even larger series of heartbreaking, forced migrations of Europeans of many different heritages which left European nations ethnically homogeneous to an unprecedented degree:

"What was taking place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer. ... The largest affected group was the Germans.

"The Germans of eastern Europe would probably have fled west in any case: by 1945 they were not wanted in the countries where their families had been settled for many hundreds of years. Between a genuine popular desire to punish local Germans for the ravages of war and occupation, and the exploitation of this mood by post-war governments, the German-speaking communities of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic region and the western Soviet Union were doomed and they knew it.

"In the event, they were given no choice. As early as 1942 the British had privately acceded to Czech requests for a post-war removal of the Sudeten German population, and the Russians and Americans fell into line the following year. On May 19th 1945, President Edouard Benes of Czechoslovakia decreed that 'we have decided to eliminate the German problem in our republic once and for all.' Germans (as well as Hungarians and other 'traitors') were to have their property placed under state control. In June 1945 their land was expropriated and on August 2nd of that year they lost their Czechoslovak citizenship. Nearly three million Germans, most of them from the Czech Sudetenland, were then expelled into Germany in the course of the following eighteen months. Approximately 267,000 died in the course of the expulsions. Whereas Germans had comprised 29 percent of the population of Bohemia and Moravia in 1930, by the census Of 1950 they were just 1.8 percent.

"From Hungary a further 623,000 Germans were expelled, from Romania 786,000, from Yugoslavia about half a million and from Poland 1.3 million, But by far the greatest number of German refugees came from the former eastern lands of Germany itself: Silesia, East Prussia, eastern Pomerania and eastern Brandenburg. At the Potsdam meeting of the US, Britain and the USSR (July 17th-August 2nd 1945) it was agreed, in the words of Article XIII of the subsequent agreement, that the three governments 'recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken.' In part this merely recognized what had already taken place, but it also represented a formal acknowledgement of the implications of shifting Poland's frontiers westwards. Some seven million Germans would now find themselves in Poland, and the Polish authorities (and the occupying Soviet forces) wanted them removed—in part so that Poles and others who lost land in the eastern regions now absorbed into the USSR could in their turn be resettled in the new lands to the West.

"The upshot was de jure recognition of a new reality. Eastern Europe had been forcibly cleared of its German populations: as Stalin had promised in September 1941, he had returned 'East Prussia back to Slavdom, where it belongs.' In the Potsdam Declaration it was agreed 'that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner', but under the circumstances this was hardly likely. Some Western observers were shocked at the treatment of the German communities. Anne O'Hare McCormick, a New York Times correspondent, recorded her impressions on October 23rd 1946: 'The scale of this resettlement, and the conditions in which it takes place, are without precedent in history."

delanceyplace.com 2/15/12 - muhammad, the founding prophet of islam

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Muhammad (570 - 632 AD), the prophet of Islam, pointed the way to the one God of his faith - Allah. Muhammad preached submission - which is what the word Islam means - to Allah in return for salvation:

"Muhammad's father died before he was born and his mother died when he was just six. But he was adopted by his uncle, who took him on trading trips to Bosra in Syria. There he was taught about Christianity by a monk, studied the Jewish and Christian scriptures, coming to venerate Jerusalem as one of the noblest of sanctuaries. In his twenties, a wealthy widow named Khadija, much older than he, employed him to manage her caravan trading and then married him. They lived in Mecca, the home of the Kaaba and its black stone, the sanctuary of a pagan god. The city thrived on the pilgrims attracted by this cult and by caravan trading. ...

"Muhammad, described as handsome with curly hair and beard, possessed both an all-conquering geniality - it was said that when he shook someone's hand he never liked to be the one to let go first - and a charismatic spirituality. He was admired for his integrity and intelligence-as his warriors later put it, 'He was the best among us' - and he was known as al-Amin, the Reliable. ...

"Outside Mecca was the Cave of Hira where Muhammad liked to meditate. In 610 AD, according to tradition, the Archangel Gabriel visited him there with his first revelation from the one God who had chosen him to be his Messenger and Prophet. When the Prophet received God's revelations, his face was said to become flushed, he fell silent, his body lying limp on the ground, sweat poured down his face; he was engulfed by humming sounds and visions - and then he would recite his poetical, divine revelations. Initially he was terrified by this, but Khadija believed in his vocation and he started to preach.

"In this rough military society where every boy and man bore arms, the literary tradition was not written but consisted of a rich spoken poetry that celebrated the deeds of honourable warriors, passionate lovers, fearless hunters. The Prophet was to harness this poetical tradition: his 114 sura-chapters-were initially recited before they were collated into the Koran, "The Recitation," a compendium of exquisite poetry, sacred obscurity, clear instruction and bewildering contradiction. ...

"Unlike Jesus, he just called himself the Messenger or Apostle of God, claiming no magical powers. Indeed the Isra - Night Journey-and the Miraj - Ascension - were his only miraculous exploits. ... The Prophet's early followers, the Emigrants and Helpers, formed his entourage - but he also welcomed former enemies and talented opportunists with equal enthusiasm. Meanwhile Muslim tradition recounts his personal life: he had many wives - Aisha, daughter of his ally Abu Bakr was his favourite - and took numerous concubines, including beautiful Jewesses and Christians; and he had children, most importantly a daughter named Fatima."

delanceyplace.com 2/14/12 - love, desire and the greek god eros

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - symposia, the private banquets of the elite in ancient Athens. They were often drunken and debauched parties, with male-only guests who were attended to by flute boys and haetera, a sort of Greek geisha or call girl. Sometimes - as reported by Plato in his masterwork Symposium - they were sober affairs with rarified discussions of ideas by sophisticated guests. One such famous but somber gathering was hosted by Agathon and attended by Socrates. The subject of the evening's discussion was the nature of Eros, the great god of desire. It is worth noting how esteemed homosexuality was at this time:

"Agathon, in a grand rhetorical flourish befitting a poet, concludes [the early portion of the discussion by saying] that though all the gods are happy, Eros is 'the most happy, since he is the most beautiful and the best.'

"To this much, all the participants save the still-silent Socrates agree. But beyond Eros's power and proximity to happiness, there is little else on which the guests can establish common ground. One speaker, Pausanias, refuses to see Eros as a single entity, claiming that he must be divided in two as Common Eros and Heavenly Eros - the one, a seedy creature drawn by sexual appetite and so depraved that he will even sleep with women; the other, a more transcendent being attracted by mind as well as beauty, who finds his consummate expression in the higher love between boys and older men. Eryximachus, on the other hand, views Eros as a pantheistic force found not only in the hearts of gods and humans but 'also in nature - in the physical life of all animals, in plants that grow in the ground, and in virtually all living organisms.'

"Finally, Aristophanes maintains in a celebrated fable that human beings were originally joined two at a time to form complete wholes. Overly powerful, these four-legged creatures provoked the suspicion of the gods, who had them sundered to reduce their strength; now each half walks the earth in search of its other. The fable explains our sexual orientation, for men originally joined to men will seek their complement in the same sex, while those originally joined to women will seek their other half accordingly. It also explains our sense of longing and loss, as we wander the earth in search of the one who will make us whole. '[W]here happiness for the human races lies,' Aristophanes concludes, is 'in the successful pursuit of love.' Eros is the great benefactor who will '[return] us to our original condition, healing us, and making us blessed and perfectly happy.'

"A pantheistic force animating the world; a schizophrenic deity both plebeian and patrician; a guide who leads us only to ourselves: Eros, clearly, is no simple god. He is, Socrates contends, no god at all. Drawing together the strands of these various reflections, Socrates maintains that Eros is, rather, a 'great spirit' who is 'midway between what is divine and what is human,' his ambiguous nature owing to the strange circumstances of his conception. Sired at the birthday party of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, Eros is the child of Poverty, who came to the festivities uninvited as a beggar, and the god Plenty, a welcome guest who passed out there drunk. How Plenty is able to perform in such a state, we are not told (presumably, a feat of the gods), but perform he does, producing a son who is neither 'mortal nor immortal.' Now fully grown, Eros takes after his mother. Constantly in need, he is 'hard, unkempt, barefoot, homeless.' But, like his father, he is 'brave, enterprising, and determined.' Having inherited 'an eye for beauty and the good,' Eros continually searches for these two qualities through love, as befits one conceived in the presence of Aphrodite.

"Straddling the human and the divine, Eros is an emissary, conducting 'all association and communication, waking or sleeping,' between the gods and men. His twofold nature explains his defining characteristic - desire itself. For what is desire but the human acknowledgment that one is in need, that one is lacking? As Socrates explains, 'the man who desires something desires what is not available to him, and what he doesn't already have in his possession.' "

delanceyplace.com 2/13/12 - romans and pepper

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - pepper and the cuisine of ancient Rome. Pepper was a rare and prized commodity whose value was almost that of gold. In antiquity, it could only be grown in the East. Pepper incited wars, was used to settle large debts and pay ransoms, and was found only on the tables of the very rich:

"The Romans were particularly serious about their food. Slave chefs would man the kitchens to create great delicacies for their consumption. A high-end menu could include dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seeds, then a whole wild boar being suckled by piglets made of cake, in which were placed live thrushes, and to finish, quince, apples and pork disguised as fowls and fish. None of these opulent culinary inventions would have been created without ample seasoning - and the primary spice would have been pepper.

"Why has this particular spice remained so constantly attractive for us? I asked the author Christine McFadden about the importance of a bit of pepper in your recipe:

"They just couldn't get enough of it. Wars were fought over it, and if you look at Roman recipes, every one starts with 'take pepper and mix with ...'. An early twentieth-century chef said that no other spice can do so much for so many different types of food, both sweet and savoury. It contains an alkaloid called piperine, which is responsible for the pungency. It promotes sweating, which cools the body - essential for comfort in hot climates. It also aids digestion, titillates the taste buds and makes the mouth water.

"The closest place to Rome where pepper actually grew was India, so the Romans had to find a way of sending ships to and fro across the Indian Ocean and then carrying their cargo overland to the Mediterranean. Whole fleets and caravans laden with pepper would travel from India to the Red Sea, then across the desert to the Nile. It was then traded around the Roman Empire by river, sea and road. This was an immense network, complicated and dangerous, but highly profitable. Roberta Tomber fills in the details:

"Strabo in the first century AD says that 120 boats left every year from Myos Hormos - a port on the Red Sea - to India. Of course, there were other ports on the Red Sea and other countries sending ships to India. The actual value of the trade was enormous - one hint we have of this is from a second-century papyrus known as the Muziris Papyrus. In that they discuss the cost of a shipload estimated today at 7 million sestertia. At that same time a soldier in the Roman army would have earned about 800 sestertia a year."

delanceyplace.com 2/10/12 - america in 1963

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - culturally, on the evening before President John F. Kennedy's assassination, America was an astonishingly monolithic country when compared to today:

"On this Thursday, November 21, television's prime-time lineup included The Flintstones, The Donna Reed Show, My Three Sons, Perry Mason, and The Perry Como Show, but it was the fourteenth-rated show, Dr. Kildare, that made Time magazine's recommended viewing. The story that week involved a pregnant unmarried teen who had gotten an abortion. She was so psycho-logically shattered by the experience that even Dr. Kildare couldn't help. He had to refer her to a psychiatrist in another CBS program, The Eleventh Hour, for an episode that would air a week later. ...

"[With its new anchor, Walter Cronkite], CBS might have been number two in evening news, but it was number one in prime-time programming. The Neilsen ratings that week placed eight CBS programs in the top ten, led by The Beverly Hillbillies with a rating of 34.9, meaning that 34.9 percent of all American homes with a television set were watching it. Since 93 percent of American homes had a television set by 1963, the upshot was that the same program was being watched in almost a third of all the homes in the United States. Those same staggering numbers went deep into the lineup. All of the top thirty-one shows had ratings of at least 20. By way of comparison, the number one show in the 2009-10 season, American Idol, considered to be a gigantic hit, had a rating of 9.1.

"The explanation for the ratings of 1963 is simple: There wasn't much choice. Most major cities had only four channels (CBS, NBC, ABC, and a nonprofit station of some sort) at most. People in some markets had access to just one channel - the monopoly in Austin, Texas, where the lone station was owned by Lady Bird Johnson, was the most notorious example.

"The limited choices in television viewing were just one example of something that would come as a surprise to a child of the twenty-first century transported back to 1963: the lack of all sorts of variety, and a simplicity that now seems almost quaint.

"Popular music consisted of a single Top 40 list, with rock, country, folk, and a fair number of Fifties-style ballads lumped together. No separate stations specializing in different genres, except for country music stations in a few parts of the nation. Except in university towns and the very largest cities, bookstores were small and scarce, usually carrying only a few hundred titles. No Amazon. If you didn't see a movie during the week or two it was showing in your town, you would probably never see it. No DVDs. With television, you either saw a show the night it played or waited until it was repeated once during the summer. No TiVo.

"People drove cars made in the United States. Foreign cars from Europe were expensive and rare. Cars from Japan had just been introduced in 1963, but had not been greeted with enthusiasm - 'made in Japan' was synonymous with products that were cheap and shoddy. You might see an occasional sports car on the road - Ford's Thunderbird or Chevrolet's Corvette - but the vast majority of customers chose among sedans, convertibles, and station wagons made by General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler.

"The typical American city of 1963 had appallingly little choice in things to eat. In a large city, you would be able to find a few restaurants serving Americanized Chinese food, a few Italian restaurants serving spaghetti and pizza, and a few restaurants with a French name, which probably meant that they had French onion soup on the menu. But if you were looking for a nice little Szechuan dish or linguine with pesto or sauteed fois gras, forget it. A Thai curry? The first Thai restaurant in the entire nation wouldn't open for another eight years. Sushi? Raw fish? Are you kidding?"

delanceyplace.com 2/9/12 - side by side toilets for better conversation

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - in the middle ages, English houses had no privacy:

"Practically all living, awake or asleep, was done in this single large, mostly bare, always smoky chamber. Servants and family ate, dressed, and slept together—'a custom which conduced neither to comfort nor the observance of the proprieties,' as J. Alfred Gotch noted with a certain clear absence of comfort himself in his classic book The Growth of the English House (1909). Through the whole of the medieval period, till well into the fifteenth century, the hall effectively was the house, so much so that it became the convention to give its name to the entire dwelling, as in Hardwick Hall or Toad Hall.

"Every member of the household, including servants, retainers, dowager widows, and anyone else with a continuing attachment, was considered family—they were literally familiar, to use the word in its original sense. In the most commanding (and usually least drafty) position in the hall was a raised platform called a dais, where the owner and his family ate—a practice recalled by the high tables still found in colleges and boarding schools that have (or sometimes simply wish to project) a sense of long tradition. The head of the household was the husband—a compound term meaning literally 'householder' or 'house owner.' His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management became known as husbandry. Only much later did husband come to signify a marriage partner. ...

"One thing that did not escape notice in medieval times was that nearly all the space above head height was unusable because it was so generally filled with smoke. ... What was needed was something that would seem, on the face of it, straightforward: a practical chimney. ... What made the difference eventually was the development of good bricks, which can deal with heat better over the long term than almost any rock can. ... So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.

"The upward expansion of houses changed everything. Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves. The first step, generally, was to build a grand new room upstairs called the great chamber, where the lord and his family did all the things they had done in the hall before—eat, sleep, loll, and play—but without so many other people about, returning to the great hall below only for banquets and other special occasions. Servants stopped being part of the family and became, well, servants.

"The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn't get enough of it. Soon it wasn't merely sufficient to live apart from one's inferiors; one had to have time apart from one's equals, too.

"As houses sprouted wings and spread, and domestic arrangements grew more complex, words were created or adapted to describe all the new room types: study, bedchamber, privy chamber, closet, oratory (for a place of prayer), parlor, withdrawing chamber, and library (in a domestic as opposed to institutional sense) all date from the fourteenth century or a little earlier. Others soon followed: gallery, long gallery, presence chamber, tiring (for attiring) chamber, salon or saloon, apartment, lodgings, suite, and estude. 'How widely different is all this from the ancient custom of the whole household living by day and night in the great hall!' wrote J. Alfred Gotch in a moment of rare exuberance. One new type not mentioned by Gotch was boudoir, literally 'a room to sulk in,' which from its earliest days was associated with sexual intrigue.

"Even with the growth of comparative privacy, life remained much more communal and exposed than today. Toilets often had multiple seats, for ease of conversation, and paintings regularly showed couples in bed or bath in an attitude of casual friskiness while attendants waited on them and their friends sat amiably nearby, playing cards or conversing but comfortably within sight and earshot."

delanceyplace.com 2/8/12 - king and love

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks on the subject of non-violence. Dr. King, as Gandhi before him, had advocated non-violent protest - but believed it was not enough merely to be non-violent. For King, there was a higher standard, and that was that you must love the person that harms you. In the following excerpt, King was speaking in 1961 to white liberals from the "Fellowship of the Concerned" at their annual meeting. He knew that many among them objected to student "sit-ins" and "freedom rides" and preferred a more gradual approach - in part because of the savage beatings being inflicted on them - and that his task was to persuade these veteran white liberals to see the student movement as a natural outgrowth of their own work and his own teachings:

"Those who adhere to or follow this philosophy [of non-violence] must follow a consistent principle of noninjury. They must consistently refuse to inflict injury upon another. Sometimes you will read the literature of the student movement and see that, as they are getting ready for the sit-in or stand-in, they will read something like this, 'If you are hit do not hit back, if you are cursed do not curse back.' This is the whole idea, that the individual who is engaged in a nonviolent struggle must never inflict injury upon another.

"Now this has an external aspect and it has an internal one. From the external point of view it means that the individuals involved must avoid external physical violence. So they don't have guns, they don't retaliate with physical violence. If they are hit in the process, they avoid external physical violence at every point. But it also means that they avoid internal violence of spirit. This is why the love ethic stands so high in the student movement. We have a great deal of talk about love and nonviolence in this whole thrust.

"Now when the students talk about love, certainly they are not talking about emotional bosh, they are not talking about merely a sentimental outpouring; they're talking something much deeper, and I always have to stop and try to define the meaning of love in this context. The Greek language comes to our aid in trying to deal with this. There are three words in the Greek language for love; one is the word eros. This is a beautiful type of love, it is an aesthetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his Dialogue, the yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come to us to be a sort of romantic love, and so in a sense we have read about it and experienced it. We've read about it in all the beauties of literature. I guess in a sense Edgar Allan Poe was talking about eros when he talked about his beautiful Annabelle Lee, with the love surrounded by the halo of eternity. In a sense Shakespeare was talking about eros when he said 'Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove; O'no! It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken, it is the star to every wandering bark.' (You know, I remember that because I used to quote it to this little lady when we were courting; that's eros.) The Greek language talks about philia which was another level of love. It is an intimate affection between personal friends, it is a reciprocal love. On this level you love because you are loved. It is friendship.

"Then the Greek language comes out with another word which is called the agape. Agape is more than romantic love, agape is more than friendship. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive, good will to all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart. So that when one rises to love on this level, he loves men not because he likes them, not because their ways appeal to him, but he loves every man because God loves him. And he rises to the point of loving the person who does an evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said 'love your enemies.'

"I'm very happy that he didn't say like your enemies, because it is pretty difficult to like some people. Like is sentimental, and it is pretty difficult to like someone bombing your home; it is pretty difficult to like somebody threatening your children; it is difficult to like congressmen who spend all of their time trying to defeat civil rights. But Jesus says love them, and love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive, creative, good will for all men. And it is this idea, it is this whole ethic of love which is the idea standing at the basis of the student movement."

delanceyplace.com 2/7/12 - democracy gets a competitor

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - with its Declaration of Independence, America became the darling of intellectuals around the world. The only ideological alternative to democracy was a return to monarchy. But those were the bucolic days of Thomas Jefferson's idyllic small farmer - just before the world felt the full force of the Industrial Revolution. In the 1800s, thousands and then hundreds of thousands of twelve-hour-a-day workers became virtual serfs in expanding factories and mines, and European powers started carving Africa and Asia up into colonies and work camps, all in the name of democracy and its presumed offspring - capitalism. And so an ideological alternative began to emerge from the writings of Karl Marx and others - communism. When America had overthrown the British monarchy, it was a triumph over oppression; when France overthrew its monarchy it was a victory for the rights of mankind. However, when one hundred years later, Bolsheviks overthrew an oppressive monarchy that had taken virtually all property rights from its people, there was no celebration in the West of another overthrown monarchy. Instead, insecure about the resiliency of its democracies, the West was threatened and immediately labeled communism as an evil.

In spite of the paranoia regarding communism that continued from 1917 through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, democratic America radically outpaced Russia. An economy built on collective property ownership proved unworkable from the start. From the time of the Russian Revolution to the present, Russia's GDP has had a rocky path from about $350 billion (in current dollars) to its current level of $1.8 trillion. U.S. GDP, already three times larger than Russia's at the time of the Revolution, is now seven times larger at $15 trillion. Equally telling, at 138 million, Russia's current population is roughly flat to its level in 1917 and is shrinking. The U.S. population, which was one-third smaller than Russia's at the time of the Revolution, is now 313 million and growing:

"The Soviet Union put the United States on the ideological defensive for the first time in its history. ... In November of 1917, V. I. Lenin led the Bolsheviks to control of Russia in 'ten days that shook the world.' Now in putative control of a huge nation, the Bolsheviks saw themselves as leaders of a global movement to liberate people everywhere from bonds forged in the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century and fastened on the limbs of workers in particular during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth. Lenin defined imperialism as 'the monopoly stage of capitalism' and 'a colonial policy of monopolistic possessions of the territory of the world which has been completely divided up'.

"Whether as supporters or critics, Americans paid close attention to Russia because it seemed to exemplify a new revolutionary spirit detached from their own largely liberal, middle-class tradition; indeed, it seemed rooted in an attack on middle-class capitalism and democracy as enslaving rather than liberating forces. Tensions ran high in the United States because the revolution in Russia implied that a communist revolution might be possible anywhere; and that, depending on one's perspective, might herald either the millennium or Armageddon. Overwhelmed by returning servicemen competing for jobs, buffeted by inflation, and shocked by the growing number of black faces appearing in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest, Americans took to the streets. Over 4 million workers participated in some 3,600 strikes in 1919, including major ones in the steel and coal industries and in the cities of Seattle and Boston. Though the strikers were concerned with immediate economic issues, the public debates over their behavior raised familiar questions about coercion and choice, liberty and power.

"In Cleveland, Socialists celebrated May Day 1919 with a large parade; they carried red flags, demanded freedom for Eugene Debs and assistance for people without jobs, and rallied their red-ribboned supporters along the way. Mockery and denunciations followed them and eventually turned into full-scale assaults. Veterans were prominent among the members of the crowds that attacked the Socialists and their headquarters. Only the deployment of army tanks restored order to Cleveland. In the aftermath of the melee, Socialists were forbidden to hold public meetings or carry red flags, and the city ordered more tanks.

"Worried about the consequences of revolutionary radicalism at home and abroad, white middle-class Protestants and businessmen winked at mobs that attacked radicals and African Americans. They supported government intervention to stamp out the 'red menace,' fulfilling Jane Addams's fear that war would strengthen nationalism and repression rather than enhance internationalism and freedom. The Red Scare preoccupied Americans in 1919 and 1920. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer justified his department's arrests of thousands of suspected radicals as a defense of a way of life against 'seditious societies' and 'the blaze of revolution.' Communists were not a political party, Palmer maintained, but an international criminal ring whose goals were 'to overthrow the decencies of private life, to usurp property that they have not earned, to disrupt the present order of life regardless of health, sex or religious rights.' "

delanceyplace.com 2/6/12 - john f. kennedy's father

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - young Joseph Kennedy, who was father to President John F. Kennedy and the architect of his ascendance. Before he gained his final fame as President Kennedy's father, he had gained outsized fame of his own, becoming one the the world's richest men, and being appointed as Ambassador to Great Britain and founding Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Known as a sharp, devious, and ruthless businessman with a larger-than-life personality, he made his fortune in movies, liquor, and real estate. He was widely believed to have been a bootlegger, though his real fortune more likely came from liquor distribution deals struck as the U.S. emerged from Prohibition. Joe Kennedy's own father was P.J. Kennedy, who started as a Boston stevedore and worked his own way to power as a State Senator and member of his city's powerful Board of Strategy:

"The arrival within a year of Joseph Patrick Kennedy delighted th ambitious mother, [Mary Augusta Hickey Kennedy], who conspicuously favored her enterprising single son over her subsequent two daughters. In later years Joe Kennedy was fond of telling reporters that he grew up 'on the mud flats of East Boston,' but in fact he spent his boyhood in a well-staffed four-story townhouse on Webster Street, a prime site overlooking the booming harbor.

"His mother coddled Joe, reminding him often that his uncle John, an M.D., had matriculated at Harvard; she curtailed his aptitude for deviltry with 'the Hickey look,' a protracted, unsettling glance of disapproval. By the time the tall, scrappy redhead graduated from Boston Latin he exhibited the bearing that was to cow so many, the long feral face, marked by full, demanding, rather brutal lips reminiscent of his son Jack's and an appraising stare that modulated as the situation required to reflect sardonic disapproval or mock astonishment or abrupt, terrifying displays of anger. Mame's baby was already in the habit of dealing with the world with a scion's disdain.

"At the exacting Boston Latin School his academics were indifferent, but his cocksure, wisecracking personality ultimately commanded a following. He was a quick study. He found that he needed a great deal of pocket money and scrambled around the neighborhoods peddling newspapers, raising pigeons, even lighting the gas lamps and stoves of the orthodox Jews on Saturday. He was a gung-ho baseball player, twice captain of his team, an accomplishment made easier by the additional year it took the slapdash scholar to graduate.

Joe's hauteur was already starting to raise hackles. 'The trouble with you, Joe,' the baseball coach at Boston Latin told him, 'is that your father holds political office. Everybody's been toadying to you for years and you think you're better than the other boys.' There was a reprimand here, but also—coming from these Protestants—the suggestion of an ethnic slight. When finally Joe did graduate, Kennedy's yearbook inscription predicted that he would arrive at fortune 'in a very roundabout way.' Allowing for Kennedy's background, deviousness was to be anticipated.

"A similar quirky performance played through at Harvard. He started out expecting to specialize in history and economics. Naturally quick with numbers, Joe found accounting too demanding, and in the end would drop enough courses to wind up majoring in music, which became a secret, lifelong outlet for the pent-up financier. Eager to advance socially, Kennedy made it his business to room in the Yard with two of the obvious class leaders, the All-American Bob Fisher and the Philadelphia Social Register blue-blood Robert Potter. Kennedy wangled his way into the Hasty Pudding and the less prestigious Dickey and Delta Upsilon but got nowhere aspiring to the better, socially restricted final clubs. A classmate would remember the loudmouthed youngster as 'an unctuous, totally unabashed social climber.' He was already pursuing Rose, the mayor's sprightly daughter, behind her disapproving father's back.

"Most unnerving of all, he failed to snag a berth on the varsity baseball team. A passable fielder, Joe ran, by one report, 'like an ice wagon.' Then, just before the all-important Yale game, the star who had beaten Kennedy out for first base, Chick McLaughlin, approached the coach and prevailed on him to put Kennedy in for long enough to earn his Harvard H. It would develop that McLaughlin intended to apply for a license to run a movie theater once he graduated; several associates of P.J. had taken Chick aside and made it clear that, if McLaughlin hoped to get his license, Joe would have to letter.

"There was a lesson here the graduating senior never forgot. Things didn't just happen; intermediaries made them happen, normally behind the scenes. Having taken this in, Joe Kennedy was primed. 'Joe was the kind of guy,' one of his teammates divulged to biographer Richard Whalen, 'who, if he wanted something bad enough, would get it, and he didn't care how he got it. He'd run right over anybody.' "

delanceyplace.com 2/3/12 - christopher robin is estranged from his father

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - when Alan (A.A.) Milne died at age 74, his only child Christopher Robin was estranged from him. Alan was a highly successful playwright of adult dramas who had unexpectedly gained worldwide fame and fortune by writing poems and children's stories about his son - starting with the books When We Were Very Young (1924) and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). The two had been extremely close - Alan called his son 'Billy Moon' and Christopher called his father 'Blue'. But the adult Christopher Robin had become bitterly resentful of his overwhelming fame, a fame so great that at one point he was considered the most famous child in the world - a burden he carried in dealing with his boarding school and college classmates. His estrangement began with his marriage shortly after his army service, and they had not reconciled when Alan passed away. Billy Moon did not overcome his resentment until more than a decade after his father's death:

"There was one great consolation [when Alan's brother and closest friend Ken died in 1929]. His relationship with his nine-year-old son Christopher was becoming even closer. Christopher was off to boarding school, his nanny, Olive Rand [Alice to readers, since it rhymed so conveniently with 'palace'], left the household, and there was no one to come between father and son in the holidays. ... For Milne, Christopher could be, as he grew up, in some ways a substitute for Ken. The letters to Ken in Somerset (once Alan had written, 'This is the world's longest letter, except one or two of St Paul's') became letters to Christopher at school. In the holidays they did things together more and more, if not, understandably, in the totally equal relationship that Milne always found easiest. From now on - for the next ten years, anyway - Christopher seems to have been his father's closest friend.

"For ten years he was close indeed to his father, 'adoring him, admiring him, accepting his ideas'. He had shown no signs of any normal adolescent rebellion. What he did show was the signs of nervous tension, of an increasing shyness, the outward expression, presumably, of a subconscious worry that he could never fulfill his father's deepest ambitions for him, that he could never be the sort of debonair young man the world expected that charming, competent child, Christopher Robin, to become - if, indeed, they imagined him growing up at all. The schoolboy Christopher Milne both trembled and stammered. He remembered the stammering like this:

"Around the age of eight - and not altogether surprisingly - my voice had begun to get itself knotted up. By the age of twelve, though I was fluent on occasions, there were other occasions when the words got themselves sadly jammed. By the age of sixteen the jamming had got worse and my shyness wasn't helping things. ...

"The boy remained anxious in all he did to please his father. He hated to disappoint his expectations. There had been some disappointment already. The first time Milne went to see his son play in a school cricket match, he was out for a duck, not scoring a single run.

"My father had always hoped that one day I would be a great cricketer, captaining the Stowe Eleven perhaps, or even playing for Cambridge. But at Stowe the tender plant that had been so devotedly nourished hour after hour at wickets during the holidays drooped and faded: I got no further than the Third Eleven.

"Milne gave up mentioning the boy's cricket in his letters. ... In 1939, on holiday in Devon, Milne and his son (who had joined the British Army) were still extremely close and would remain so throughout the war, though for several years separated by many hundreds of miles. Much of Milne's writing energy would go into letters to his son - first to Cambridge, then to army camps at Newark, at Barton Stacey in Hampshire, to Aldershot, to Sible Hedingham in Essex - and then to destinations all over the Middle East, North Africa and Italy as the young man travelled here and there with the fortunes of war. It was the war that would eventually allow him to make the necessary escape from his father, to be himself, to put his childhood finally behind him. Those five years, he would say, 'provided me with a foundation stone, strong and lasting, on which to build my adult life.' "

delanceyplace.com 2/2/12 - the brain in love

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:29:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - Valentine's Day tidbits. Where do we find enduring love? Answer: Oxytocin. Infidelity? Testosterone. Heartbreak? Low serotonin and endorphins. In fact, our loved ones are actually present in our brains - neurochemically - and when we lose them, it results in chemical trauma for the brain:

"An American study of over four thousand men found that husbands with high testosterone levels were 43 percent more likely to get divorced and 38 percent more likely to have extramarital affairs than men with lower levels. They were also 50 percent less likely to get married at all. Men with the least amounts of testosterone were more likely to get married and to stay married, maybe because low testosterone levels make men calmer, less aggressive, less intense, and more cooperative.

"The desire to commit to someone is strongly linked to ... oxytocin. ... Oxytocin is released by the pituitary gland and acts on the ovaries and testes to regulate reproduction. Researchers suspect that this hormone is important for forming close social bonds. The levels of this chemical rise when couples watch romantic movies, hug, or hold hands. Prairie voles [mammals related to the mouse], when injected with oxytocin, pair much faster than normally. Blocking oxytocin prevents them from bonding in a normal way. This is similar in humans, because couples bond to certain characteristics in each other. This is why you are attracted to the same type of man or woman repeatedly. In general, levels of oxytocin are lower in men, except after an orgasm, where they are raised more than 500 percent. This may explain why men feel very sleepy after an orgasm. This is the same hormone released in babies during breast-feeding, which makes them sleepy as well.

"Oxytocin is also related to the feelings of closeness and being 'in love' when you have regular sex for several reasons. First, the skin is sensitized by oxytocin, encouraging affection and touching behavior. Then, oxytocin levels rise during subsequent touching and eventually even with the anticipation of being touched. Oxytocin increases during sexual activity, peaks at orgasm, and stays elevated for a period of time after intercourse. ... In addition, there is an amnesic effect created by oxytocin during sex and orgasm that blocks negative memories people have about each other for a period of time. The same amnesic effect occurs from the release of oxytocin during childbirth, while a mother is nursing to help her forget the labor pain, and during long, stressful nights spent with a newborn so that she can bond to her baby with positive feelings and love.

"Higher oxytocin levels are also associated with an increased feeling of trust. In a landmark study by Michael Kosfeld and colleagues from Switzerland published in the journal Nature, intranasal oxytocin was found to increase trust. Men who inhale a nasal spray spiked with oxytocin give more money to partners in a risky investment game than do men who sniff a spray containing a placebo. This substance fosters the trust needed for friendship, love, families, economic transactions, and political networks. According to the study's authors, 'Oxytocin specifically affects an individual's willingness to accept social risks arising through interpersonal interactions.' ...

"What happens in the brain when you lose someone you love? Why do we hurt, long, even obsess about the other person? When we love someone, they come to live in the emotional or limbic centers of our brains. He or she actually occupies nerve-cell pathways and physically lives in the neurons and synapses of the brain. When we lose someone, either through death, divorce, moves, or breakups, our brain starts to get confused and disoriented. Since the person lives in the neuronal connections, we expect to see her, hear her, feel her, and touch her. When we cannot hold her or talk to her as we usually do, the brain centers where she lives becomes inflamed looking for her. Overactivity in the limbic brain has been associated with depression and low serotonin levels, which is why we have trouble sleeping, feel obsessed, lose our appetites, want to isolate ourselves, and lose the joy we have about life. A deficit in endorphins, which modulate pain and pleasure pathways in the brain, also occurs, which may be responsible for the physical pain we feel during a breakup."

delanceyplace.com 2/1/12 - the ultimate clock

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the technology of our daily lives has become so advanced that the need for accuracy in clocks presses hard the most accurate of today's clocks - which are accurate to five parts per 100,000,000,000,000,000 (or five in 1016). Improving this accuracy is absolutely necessary for such things as improved GPS navigation, improved satellite communication, and improved detection of faults in the massive communication networks we now depend on:

"Today those who would build a more accurate clock must advance into the frontiers of physics and engineering in several directions at once. They are cobbling lasers that spit out pulses a quadrillionth of a second long together with chambers that chill atoms to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. They are snaring individual ions in tar pits of light and magnetism and manipulating the spin of electrons in their orbits.

"And thanks to major technical advances, the art of ultraprecise timekeeping is progressing with a speed not seen for 30 years or more. These days a good cesium beam clock, of the kind Symmetricom sells for $50,000, will tick off seconds true to about a microsecond a month, its frequency accurate to five parts in 1013. The primary time standard for the U.S., a cesium fountain clock installed in 1999 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at its Boulder, Colo., laboratory, is good to five parts in 1016 (usually written simply as 10-16). That is 1000 times the accuracy of NIST's best clock in 1975. Successful prototypes of new clock designs - devices that extract time from calcium atoms or mercury ions instead of cesium - have recently attained accuracy in the 10-18 range, a 100-fold improvement in a decade.

"Accuracy may not be quite the right word. The second was defined in 1967 by international fiat to be 'the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 13enable utilities and communications firms to trace faults in their networks, and enhance geologists' ability to pinpoint earthquakes and nuclear bomb tests. Astronomers could use them to connect telescopes in ways that dramatically sharpen their images. And inexpensive, microchip-size atomic clocks are likely to have myriad uses not yet imagined." 3 atom.' Leave aside for the moment what that means: the point is that to measure a second, you have to look at cesium. The best clocks now don't - so, strictly speaking, they don't measure seconds. That is one predicament the clock makers face.

"Further down the road lies a more fundamental limitation: as Albert Einstein theorized and experiment has confirmed, time is not absolute. The rate of any clock slows down when gravity gets stronger or when the clock moves quickly relative to its observer - even a single photon emitted as an electron reorients its magnetic poles or jumps from one orbit to another. By putting ultraprecise clocks on the space station, scientists hope to put relativity theory through its toughest tests yet. But now that clocks have achieved a precision of 10-18 - proportions that correspond to a deviation of less than half a second over the age of the universe - the effects of relativity have started to test the scientists. No technology exists that can synchronize clocks around the world with such exactness.

"So why bother to improve atomic clocks? The duration of the second can already be measured to 14 decimal places, a precision 1,000 times that of any other fundamental unit. ... More stable and portable clock designs could ... be a big boon to navigation, enhancing the accuracy and reliability of the Global Positioning System and of Galileo, a competing system under development in Europe. Better clocks would help NASA track its satellites.

delanceyplace.com 1/31/12 - the united states dominates

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - when World War I began in 1914, even though England still behaved as if it was the world's leader, the United States was already the dominant country. In fact, the United States economy was already as large as the economies of England, France and Germany combined - and its banks held as much gold as those three nations combined. And after those countries squandered their resources in the that gruesome war, the United States held three times as much gold as those three nations combined. The U.S. dominance had become even greater, and within the scramble by England, France, and Germany to rectify this imbalance and replenish their gold were the seeds of both the Great Depression and World War II:

"Before the war, the four largest economies - the United States, Britain, Germany, and France - had operated their monetary systems with about $5 billion worth of gold among them. The amount of new gold mined during the war was small, and by 1923, monetary gold had increased only to $6 billion. Meanwhile, prices in the United States and the UK, even after the postwar deflation, were still 50 percent higher than before the war, which meant that in effect the real purchasing power of gold reserves had contracted by almost 25 percent. ...

"The [big] concern among bankers after the war was not so much that the world was short of gold, but that too much of the gold was concentrated in the United States. Before the war, there had been some parity among the major economic powers between the amount of gold in each banking system and the size of its economy. For example, the United States, with a GDP of $40 billion, accounted for about half the output of the four great economic powers and held about $2 billion in gold, a little less than half of the total gold of these four countries. The balance was only rough - France held proportionately more and Britain less - but the system worked with remarkable smoothness.

By 1923, the United States had accumulated close to $4.5 billion of the $6 billion in gold reserves of the four major economic powers, far in excess of what it needed to sustain its economy. About $400 million circulated in the form of coins; the remainder consisted of ingots, small bars the size of a quart of milk, each weighing about twenty-five pounds, stored in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Banks and the Treasury. The largest hoard lay under lower Manhattan, about $1.5 billion in the Treasury repository at the legendary intersection of Broad and Wall Streets, and at the New York Fed. The remainder was scattered among the eleven other Federal Reserve Banks across the country. ...

"While the U.S. monetary system was swamped by this enormous surplus, Europe, particularly Britain and Germany, suffered a chronic shortage. The three big European economies, which had operated before the war on $3 billion worth of gold, were left with barely half that. Faced with constant demands to pay out gold, European central banks had resorted to a complex of measures, the most important being to withdraw gold coins from circulation. All those solid talismans of turn-of-the-century middle-class prosperity had gradually disappeared from Europe's pockets, to be replaced by shabby pieces of paper. By the mid-1920s, the United States was the only large country where one could still find gold coins.

"The concentration of the world's key precious metal in the United States had left the rest of the world with insufficient reserves to grease the machinery of trade. The world of the international gold standard had become like a poker table at which one player has accumulated all the chips, and the game simply cannot get back into play."

delanceyplace.com 1/30/12 - you are influenced in ways you don't realize

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - our memory works in such a way that things that happen to us in one moment influence our behavior after that in ways we don't realize. It is a process psychologists refer to as priming, and it suggests, for example, that adopting positive language and mannerisms can in fact make us more positive:

"If you have recently seen or heard the word EAT, you are temporarily more likely to complete the word fragment SO_P as SOUP than as SOAP. The opposite would happen, of course, if you had just seen WASH. We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP.

"Priming effects take many forms. If the idea of EAT is currently on your mind (whether or not you are conscious of it), you will be quicker than usual to recognize the word SOUP when it is spoken in a whisper or presented in a blurry font. And of course you are primed not only for the idea of soup but also for a multitude of food-related ideas, including fork, hungry, fat, diet, and cookie. ... Like ripples on a pond, activation spreads through a small part of the vast network of associated ideas. The mapping of these ripples is now one of the most exciting pursuits in psychological research.

"Another major advance in our understanding of memory was the discovery that priming is not restricted to concepts and words. You cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware. In an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at New York University - most aged eighteen to twenty-two - to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (for example, 'finds he it yellow instantly'). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. When they had completed that task, the young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. That short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others.

"The 'Florida effect' involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness. When they were questioned afterward, none of the students reported noticing that the words had had a common theme, and they all insisted that nothing they did after the first experiment could have been influenced by the words they had encountered. The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This remarkable priming phenomenon - the influencing of an action by the idea - is known as the ideomotor effect. ...

"The ideomotor link also works in reverse. A study conducted in a German university was the mirror image of the early experiment that Bargh and his colleagues had carried out in New York. Students were asked to walk around a room for 5 minutes at a rate of 30 steps per minute, which was about one-third their normal pace. After this brief experience, the participants were much quicker to recognize words related to old age, such as forgetful, old, and lonely....

"Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused. Go ahead and take a pencil, and hold it between your teeth for a few seconds with the eraser pointing to your right and the point to your left. Now hold the pencil so the point is aimed straight in front of you, by pursing your lips around the eraser end. You were probably unaware that one of these actions forced your face into a frown and the other into a smile. College students were asked to rate the humor of cartoons from Gary Larsons The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were 'smiling' (without any awareness of doing so) found the cartoons funnier than did those who were 'frowning.' In another experiment, people whose face was shaped into a frown (by squeezing their eyebrows together) reported an enhanced emotional response to upsetting pictures - starving children, people arguing, maimed accident victims."

delanceyplace.com 1/27/12 - keith richards meets mick jagger

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the letter below was written by eighteen-year-old Keith Richards to his Aunt Patty. It came to light in 2009 and had not been read by anyone outside the family prior to the recent release of his autobiography. In it, he describes meeting Mick Jagger in 1961. Almost immediately, they were regularly hanging out and "trying to learn how to do it." They went on to worldwide fame as the founding members of The Rolling Stones:

6 Spielman Rd
Dartford
Kent

Dear Pat,

So sorry not to have written before (I plead insane) in bluebottle voice. Exit right amid deafening applause.

I do hope you're very well.

We have survived yet another glorious English Winter. I wonder which day Summer falls on this year?

Oh but my dear I have been soooo busy since Christmas beside working at school. You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin' on Dartford Stn. (that's so I don't have to write a long word like station) I was holding one of Chuck's records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y'know came up to me. He's got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too, they are all rhythm and blues fans, real R&B I mean (not this Dinah Shore, Brook Benton crap) Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Chuck, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker all the Chicago bluesmen real lowdown stuff, marvelous. Bo Diddley he's another great.

Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger and all the chicks and the boys meet every Saturday morning in the 'Carousel' some juke-joint well one morning in Jan I was walking past and decided to look him up. Everybody's all over me I get invited to about 10 parties. Beside that Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe. I play guitar (electric) Chuck style we got us a bass player and drummer and rhythm-guitar and we practice 2 or 3 nights a week SWINGIN'.

Of course they're all rolling in money and in massive detached houses, crazy, one's even got a butler. I went round there with Mick (in the car of course Mick's not mine of course) OH BOY ENGLISH IS IMPOSSIBLE.

"Can I get you anything, sir?"
"Vodka and lime, please"
"Certainly, sir"

I really felt like a lord, nearly asked for my coronet when I left.

Everything here is just fine.

I just can't lay off Chuck Berry though, I recently got an LP of his straight from Chess Records Chicago cost me less than an English record.

Of course we've still got the old Lags here y'know Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and 2 new shockers Shane Fenton and Jora Leyton SUCH CRAP YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD. Except for that greaseball Sinatra ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Still I don't get bored anymore. This Saturday I am going to an all night party.

"I looked at my watch
It was four-o-five
Man I didn't know
If I was dead or alive"
Quote Chuck Berry
Reeling and a Rocking

12 galls of Beer Barrel of Cyder, 3 bottle Whiskey Wine. Her ma and pa gone away for the weekend I'll twist myself till I drop (I'm glad to say).

The Saturday after Mick and I are taking 2 girls over to our favourite Rhythm & Blues club over in Ealing, Middlesex.

They got a guy on electric harmonica Cyril Davies fabulous always half drunk unshaven plays like a mad man, marvelous.

Well then I can't think of anything else to bore you with, so I'll sign off goodnight viewers

BIG GRIN

Luff
Keith xxxxx
Who else would write such bloody crap

delanceyplace.com 1/26/12 - "this land is your land" is a protest song

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:00:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - in the wake of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote the song "This Land is Your Land," a satire and protest against what he saw as the unrealistic vision of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." It was originally titled "God Bless America for Me," and the original chorus used that line instead of "this land was made for you and me." Guthrie, who was later an inspiration for Bob Dylan, eventually deleted two verses, perhaps because he knew he couldn't get the song published otherwise - one that lamented the lack of help provided by America's churches for the poor, and the other his protest against the idea of private property (read those verses below):

"Folk music's hero was, of course, Woody Guthrie. Guthrie led by example, not by precepts, although his charisma and songwriting skills gave him a certain messianic quality. ... Musicians simply followed Guthrie. He was a journeyman, traveling across the United States to learn traditional folk and blues songs, trailing migrant workers from Oklahoma to California. Guthrie's observations of the economic and environmental hardships of the Dust Bowl era inspired him to write his own lyrics about working people, which he set to traditional folk music.

"Topical songwriting as defined by Guthrie meant chronicling a plane crash of migrant workers soon after it happened, with politics giving the lament implicit meaning. 'I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work,' said Guthrie - a goal that would impact his most popular song, 'This Land Is Your Land,' a response to Irving Berlin's 'God Bless America.' Guthrie's original 1944 version contained two recriminatory verses, but he later killed them to preserve the wholly patriotic tone of the version that went on to become an American songbook classic. His songs told the truth - as long as it was an uplifting truth.

"In the late 1950s, growing pools of folksingers in Cambridge and Greenwich Village took Guthrie's lead and focused on the issues of the day, especially civil rights. Though all these musicians knew and admired Guthrie, the one to seek him out in his declining years at the Greystone Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey, was Bob Dylan. Dylan idolized Guthrie, calling him 'the true voice of the American Spirit' - indeed, Guthrie is one of the few subjects Dylan does not obfuscate in his memoir Chronicles. When Dylan first hit the coffeehouse scene in New York in 1961, he could be accurately introduced onstage as a 'young folksinger' who 'sang a lot of Woody's tunes.' In those days, a musician was presented with a body of songs, or 'rebel ballads,' as Dylan liked to call them, so authoritative that it took real ingenuity even to think beyond them."

The original last two verses of "This Land is Your Land":

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign there, It said "no trespassing." [In another version, the sign reads "Private Property"]
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing!
That side was made for you and me.

delanceyplace.com 1/25/12 - money made from wood

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - money has been made from strange things - wood, leather, tobacco leaves, salt, ceramic tiles and a wide variety of other materials. This reflects money's origin as a token of debt, an agreement to pay based on trust in the issuer of the coin - as opposed to the inherent worth of the coin. Even coins made of gold or silver would usually trade at a premium to the value of the metal - reflecting trust in the strength of the king/money-redeemer who issued the coin:

"Within the Roman empire, a silver coin stamped with the image of Tiberius might have circulated at a value considerably higher than the value of the silver it contained. Ancient coins invariably circulated at a value higher than their metal content. ...

"Within a community - a town, a city, a guild or religious society - pretty much anything could function as money, provided everyone knew there was someone willing to accept it to cancel out a debt. To offer one particularly striking example, in certain cities in nineteenth-century Siam, small change consisted entirely of porcelain Chinese gaming counters - basically, the equivalent of poker chips - issued by local casinos. If one of these casinos went out of business or lost its license, its owners would have to send a crier through the streets banging a gong and announcing that anyone holding such chits had three days to redeem them. For major transactions, of course, currency that was also acceptable outside the community (usually silver or gold again) was ordinarily employed.

"In a similar way, English shops, for many centuries, would issue their own wood or lead or leather token money. The practice was often technically illegal, but it continued until relatively recent times. [In] an example from the seventeenth century, a certain Henry, who had a store at Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, ... would provide small change in the form of IOUs redeemable at his own store. As such, they might circulate broadly, at least among anyone who did regular business at that shop. But they were unlikely to travel very far from Stony Stratford - most tokens, in fact, never circulated more than a few blocks in any direction. For larger transactions, everyone, including Henry, expected money in a form that would be acceptable anywhere, including in Italy or France.

"Throughout most of history, even where we do find elaborate markets, we also find a complex jumble of different sorts of currency. Some of these may have originally emerged from barter between foreigners: the cacao money of Mesoamerica or salt money of Ethiopia are frequently cited examples. Others arose from credit systems, or from arguments over what sort of goods should be acceptable to pay taxes or other debts. Such questions were often matters of endless contestation. One could often learn a lot about the balance of political forces in a given time and place by what sorts of things were acceptable as currency.

"For instance: in much the same way that colonial Virginia planters managed to pass a law obliging shopkeepers to accept their tobacco as currency, medieval Pomeranian peasants appear to have at certain points convinced their rulers to make taxes, fees, and customs duties, which were registered in Roman currency, actually payable in wine, cheese, peppers, chickens, eggs, and even herring - much to the annoyance of traveling merchants, who therefore had to either carry such things around in order to pay the tolls or buy them locally at prices that would have been more advantageous to their suppliers for that very reason. This was in an area with a free peasantry, rather than serfs. They were in a relatively strong political position. In other times and places, the interests of lords and merchants prevailed instead.

"Thus money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token. This is probably why coins - pieces of silver or gold that are already valuable commodities in themselves, but that, being stamped with the emblem of a local political authority, became even more valuable - still sit in our heads as the quintessential form of money."

delanceyplace.com 1/24/12 - the mysterious meeting on jekyll island

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - when the 1907 financial panic hit the United States, there was no central bank, so a consortium of private banks led by JP Morgan had to dramatically intervene to rescue the banking system. America was the only major power without a central bank - a bank with the power to issue currency such as Britain's Bank of England and France's Banque de France. Even though the 1800s had been filled with banking panics, to the banker's dismay Americans had resisted the idea of a central bank, with Thomas Jefferson blocking the renewal of the First Bank of the United States in 1816, and Andrew Jackson blocking the renewal of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836. So after 1907 a renewed effort was made to create a central bank, which included a monumental and secret meeting on Jekyll Island that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913:

"The 1907 panic exposed how fragile and vulnerable was the country's banking system. Though the panic had finally been contained by decisive action on Morgan's part, it became clear that the United States could not afford to keep relying on one man to guarantee its stability, especially since that man was now seventy years old, semiretired, and focused primarily on amassing an unsurpassed art collection and yachting to more congenial climes with his bevy of middle-aged mistresses.

"Shaken by the crisis, the U.S. Congress decided to act. In 1908, it created the National Monetary Commission, consisting of nine senators and nine representatives, and chaired by Senator Nelson Aldrich, to undertake a comprehensive study of the banking system and to make recommendations for its reform. Over the next few years, the commission produced a voluminous set of studies on central banking in Europe but not much else. Memories of how close the system had come to imploding progressively dimmed and the momentum for reform stalled.

"In 1912, Henry Davison, a Morgan partner, frustrated by the lack of progress and fearing that without changes the next panic would be even more catastrophic, set out to convene a meeting of experts to develop a formal plan to establish an American central bank - the third in the nation's history. Only five men were invited. Besides Davison himself, there was Senator Aldrich; Frank Vanderlip, the forty-eight-year-old president of the National City Bank, the largest in the country; Paul Warburg, of the well-known Hamburg banking family, a forty-two-year-old partner at Kuhn Loeb who, although he had only just moved to New York, was probably the greatest expert on central banking in the United States; A. Piatt Andrew Jr., the thirty-nine-year-old assistant secretary of the treasury, who had been a professor at Harvard and accompanied the original commission on its European study tour; and Benjamin Strong, then thirty-nine years old.

"Davison was worried, and for good reason, that any plan put together by a group from Wall Street would immediately be suspect as the misbegotten product of a bankers' cabal. He therefore chose to hold the meeting in secret on a small private island off the coast of Georgia - in effect creating the very bankers' cabal that would have aroused so much public suspicion. The preparations were elaborate. Each guest was told to go to Hoboken Station in New Jersey on November 22 and board Senator Aldrich's private railroad car, which they would find hitched with its blinds drawn to the Florida train. They were not to dine together, nor to meet up beforehand, but to come aboard singly and as unobtrusively as possible, all under cover of going duck hunting. As an added precaution, they were to use only their first names. Strong was to be Mr. Benjamin, Warburg Mr. Paul. Davison and Vanderlip went a step further and adopted the ringingly obvious pseudonyms Wilbur and Orville. Later in life, the group used to refer to themselves as the 'First Name Club.'

"Disembarking at Brunswick, Georgia, they were taken by boat to Jekyll Island, one of the small barrier islands off the Georgia coast, owned by the private Jekyll Island Club, which had opened in 1888 as a hunting and winter retreat for wealthy northerners. Described by one magazine as 'the richest, the most exclusive and most inaccessible club in the world,' it numbered only some fifty members, including J. P. Morgan, William Vanderbilt, William Rockefeller, Joseph Pulitzer, and various Astors and Goulds. Membership was now closed and had become hereditary.

"For the next ten days, the little party had the club with its skeleton staff to themselves - it had been closed for the summer and would not be open to other members for several weeks. They worked every day from early morning to midnight, convening in the luxurious rambling clubhouse with its turret, fifteen-foot ceilings, and numerous verandas and bay windows overlooking the Atlantic Ocean."

delanceyplace.com 1/23/12 - exponential improvements in medicine

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:35:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - medicine is beginning to turn into an information-based science, in contrast to the hit-and-miss laboratory processes of the past. As that transition continues, success in medical treatments will begin to occur at an increasingly exponential pace:

"Today, the computer in your cell phone is a million times smaller, a million times less expensive, and a thousand times more powerful [than the computer at MIT in 1965]. That's a billionfold increase in price-performance. As powerful and influential as information technology is already, we will experience another billionfold increase in capability for the same cost in the next 25 years (rather than the 40 years or so it took for the most recent billionfold increase) because the rate of exponential growth is itself getting faster.

"The other important point to make is that this remarkable exponential growth is not just limited to computer and communication devices. It is now applicable to our own biology, and that is a very recent change. Consider, for example, the Human Genome Project. It was controversial when announced in 1990 because mainstream skeptics pointed out that with our best experts and most advanced equipment, we had only managed to complete one-ten thousandth of the genome in 1989. The skeptics were still going strong halfway through the 15-year project as they pointed out that with half of the time having gone by, only 1 percent of the genome had been completed!

"But this was right on schedule for an exponential progression. ... If you double one percent seven more times - which is exactly what happened - you get 100 percent, and the project was completed not only on time but ahead of schedule. Similarly, the cost for sequencing a single DNA base pair fell a millionfold over the same period, from $10 in 1990 to less than one-thousandth of a penny in 2008.

"We have exactly doubled the amount of the genetic data collected each year since 1990, and this pace has continued since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. The cost of sequencing a base pair of DNA - the building blocks of our genes - has dropped by half each year from $10 per base pair in 1990 to a small fraction of a penny today. Deciphering the first human genome cost a billion dollars. Today, anyone can have it done for $350,000. But, in case that's still out of your budget, just be patient for a little while longer. We are now only a few years away from a $1,000 human genome. Almost every other aspect of our ability to understand biology in information terms is similarly doubling every year.

"Our genes are essentially little software programs, and they evolved when conditions were very different than they are today. Take, for example, the fat insulin receptor gene, which essentially says 'hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well.' That gene made a lot of sense tens of thousands of years ago, at a time when food was almost always in short supply and there were no refrigerators. In those days, famines were common and starvation was a real possibility, so it was a good idea to store as many as possible of the calories you could find in your body's fat cells.

"Today, the fat insulin receptor gene underlies an epidemic of weight problems, with two of three American adults now overweight and one in three obese. What would happen if we suddenly turned off this gene in the fat cells? Scientists actually performed this experiment on mice at the Joslin Diabetes Center. The animals whose fat insulin receptor gene was turned off ate as much as they wanted yet remained slim. And it wasn't an unhealthy slimness. They didn't get diabetes or heart disease, and they lived and remained healthy about 20 percent longer than the control mice, which still had their fat insulin receptor gene working. The experimental mice experienced the health benefits of caloric restriction - the only laboratory-proven method of life extension - while doing just the opposite and eating as much as they wanted. Several pharmaceutical companies are now rushing to bring these concepts to the human market."

delanceyplace.com 1/20/12 - the girls who hung around the rat pack, hoping

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the young women of the early 1960s who wanted to gain the attention and favors of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and the other members and attendants of the Rat Pack. In spite of the hopes of these women, they rarely gained the attention of the Rat Pack, and when they did, it was usually only for a short, sexual moment in the whirl that accompanied the Rat Pack celebrity:

"Like the food at a party, flashy girls come in a variety of shades and sizes, but it's always the same variety. They are presented as 'actresses,' that's the standard line whether they are starlets or hookers. In New York, the term is model." - Judith Campbell Exner

"The women, who didn't seem to mind being referred to as 'broads,' sat up straight with their legs crossed and little expectant smiles on their carefully made-up faces. They sipped white wine, smoked, and eyed the men, laughing at every joke. . . . A long time would pass before any of the women dared to speak, then under the main male conversation they talked about their cats, or where they bought their clothes; but more than half an ear was always with the men, just in case. As hours passed, the women, neglected in their chairs, drooped; no longer listening, no longer laughing." - Mia Farrow

"Could they see women as real beings with needs and intelligence? Did they ever communicate on a fulfilling level? I was secretly grateful that I didn't really see them as potential lovers. Had anything like that developed, I would have been in real trouble." - Shirley MacLaine

"It seemed to me that the married men were worse than the single ones. They were always looking, always hunting. You'd see them at parties with different girls and every once in a while you'd see them at a party with their wives. As far as I was concerned, I had made up my mind that if I got married again, I'd have to accept the fact that my husband would cheat." - Judith Campbell Exner

delanceyplace.com 1/19/12 - we still eat neolithic food

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:27:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - even at the fanciest restaurants, we still eat the same narrow range of meats and grains first domesticated and cultivated in the Neolithic period. Our hunter-gatherer forbearers ate surprising well, and we were reduced to narrowed, poorer diets when we first moved from hunter-gatherer societies to city-based agricultural societies. These narrowed diets brought stunted growth and greater disease. So why did we transition from the relative freedom and better food of hunter-gatherer societies to the serfdom and disease of agricultural societies? In part because the percentage of deaths by warfare fell to single digits from rates that had been well over 50% for some hunter-gatherers:

"It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today. Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well—and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much smaller range of foods, which all but ensured dietary insufficiencies. The three great domesticated crops of prehistory were rice, wheat, and maize, but all had significant drawbacks as staples. As the journalist John Lanchester explains: 'Rice inhibits the activity of Vitamin A; wheat has a chemical that impedes the action of zinc and can lead to stunted growth; maize is deficient in essential amino acids and contains phytates, which prevent the absorption of iron.' The average height of people actually fell by almost six inches in the early days of farming in the Near East. Even on Orkney, where prehistoric life was probably as good as it could get, an analysis of 340 ancient skeletons showed that hardly any people lived beyond their twenties.

"What killed the Orcadians was not dietary deficiency but disease. People living together are vastly more likely to spread illness from household to household, and the close exposure to animals through domestication meant that flu (from pigs or fowl), smallpox and measles (from cows and sheep), and anthrax (from horses and goats, among others) could become part of the human condition, too. As far as we can tell, virtually all of the infectious diseases have become endemic only since people took to living together. Settling down also brought a huge increase in 'human commensals'—mice, rats, and other creatures that live with and off us—and these all to often acted as disease vectors.

"So sedentism meant poorer diets, more illness, lots of toothache and gum disease, and earlier deaths. What is truly extraordinary is that these are all still factors in our lives today. Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven---corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. Exactly the same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.

"We are, in the most fundamental way, Stone Age people ourselves. From a dietary point of view, the Neolithic period is still with us. We may sprinkle our dishes with bay leaves and chopped fennel, but underneath it all is Stone Age food. And when we get sick, it is Stone Age diseases we suffer."

delanceyplace.com 1/18/12 - a.a. milne, winnie-the-pooh, and the great war

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - when World War I began, many British felt it would be good for the moral character of the nation - an antidote for a country where "the lower classes seem to have no discipline." There were hours and days of singing and rejoicing in the streets. Among those who were not enthused was a young Cambridge-educated man named A.A. Milne, an editor of Punch and later the author of Winnie-the-Pooh. He nonetheless volunteered and served in the trenches of France. Europe suffered ten million deaths during that war, and Winnie-the-Pooh was written in the bitter aftermath:

"A.A. (Alan) Milne says in his autobiography that he would have liked to ignore the four years he spent in the army.'I should like to put asterisks here, and then write 'It was in 1919 that I found myself once again a civilian.' For it makes me almost physically sick to think of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation, the war.' But of course the war cannot be ignored. In 1914, no one (reader, writer, or hero) can ignore history.

"Alan Milne overheard hideous talk in the smoking-rooms of golf clubs and recorded it in the issue of Punch that came out the day after war was declared. 'What England wants,' someone said, leaning back and puffing at his cigar - he was, of course, himself well past military age - 'What England wants is a war. (Another whisky and soda, waiter.) We're getting flabby. All this pampering of the poor is playing the very deuce with the country. A bit of a scrap with a foreign power would do us all the good in the world.' He disposed of his whisky at a draught.'We're flabby,' he repeated.'The lower classes seem to have no discipline nowadays. We want a war to brace us up.'

"It is difficult for us to understand, after the killing of one Archduke had led to the deaths 'of ten million men who were not archdukes', just how widely the war was welcomed in 1914. The newspapers carried pictures of grinning young men, rejoicing and waving their hats on their way to the recruiting offices. Asquith, the Prime Minister, wrote to Venetia Stanley: 'The streets are full of cheering crowds,' and the Commons applauded his announcement of the ultimatum, although the Kaiser had already described the treaty respecting Belgian neutrality as a mere scrap of paper. The Times reported that, outside Buckingham Palace,'for more than four hours the singing and cheering of the crowd was maintained without a break.'

" 'How glorious is the complete unity of the nation,'wrote (Alan's wife) Daphne's aunt, Anne de Selincourt, on 19 August. 'So many of the finest types in Britain one feels are meant for a crisis like this. Liege will go down in history like the Seven against Thebes or the Pass of Thermopylae, won't it? 'Two years later, when Alan Milne was himself on the Somme, she would write sadly from a hospital in France, where she was working for the American Red Cross: 'One really begins to feel that every young creature one has ever heard of is going to be killed.'

" 'War,' Milne had often said, 'is the most babyish and laughably idiotic thing that this poor world has evolved.' But now that England was actually at war, and there was nothing laughable about it (he could also see clearly, as so few people could at the beginning, that there was nothing glorious about it either), Milne felt he had to do something. As soon as war was inevitable, he had written to Edward Marsh, begging him to find him some work in the Admiralty."

delanceyplace.com 1/17/12 - the johnny carson show was the mecca for comedians

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the 1970s were highly fertile years for comedy in America. That period yielded a who's who of future stars bursting forth from places like the Second City Comedy Club. For most though, it was a painful rite of passage, appearing at clubs that did not pay, taking menial jobs to pay rent, and dreaming of that one appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show that would send them to stardom. Two such comedians were Al Franken (now a U.S. Senator) and Tom Davis - Franken and Davis - who later gained fame as writers and performers on Saturday Night Live:

"For a stand-up comedian in L.A. in late 1973, getting on 'The Carson Show,' as we called it, was everyone's goal. It was a rite of passage for all the great ones, who still crawled over each other to appear on that stage. Craig Tennis was The Tonight Show's chief talent coordinator. He would periodically attend a Friday or Saturday 10:00 to 11:30 at Sammy Shore's Comedy Store, sitting in the booth in the back, like an emperor at the games.You'd find out what you were worth by your order in the lineup. Each act was allotted ten minutes, but almost everybody would go overtime, some worse than others.

Other: 'Hey man-you were out there twenty-five minutes.'

Worse: 'Yeah - but I was killing! Did you hear them?'

"So a few acts on the bottom of the list would miss the Emperor's audience. It was not fun.

"However, Franken and Davis were chosen to audition at The Tonight Show studio at NBC Burbank, along with two other stand-ups. A van picked us up at noon on a Saturday in front of the Hyatt on Sunset, next door to the Comedy Store and its empty parking lot. Why didn't they pick us up there? I don't know.

"At our destination, we were shown into the cold, cavernous Tonight Show studio and seated in the center, a few rows up from the floor. Finally, Craig Tennis entered with a gaggle of production staffers and they sat above us several rows, just outside the general stage lighting.

"Steve Lubetkin was up first. He was maybe a year or two older than Al and I. He had a good act - I remember something about insect actors auditioning for The Hellstrom Chronicles (a popular low-budget documentary feature about how insects will rule the world). Watching Steve caught in the stage lights made it seem kind of ironic.

"Al and I did our local news on the day of World War III routine. ...

"After we had all endured this scrutiny, we watched them climb the stairs up to the executive offices and disappear. After half an hour, an imperial guard appeared and announced, 'Sorry, but we don't have a place for you on our show now. Thank you and good luck.'

"In the van on the way back, Lubetkin was very upset. 'I can't believe it! I got turned down by Carson!'

Al: 'It's okay, Steve. There'll be other things.'

Steve: 'But that was my best stuff!'

I: 'F**k Johnny Carson.'

Steve: 'No - I'm f**ked.'

"Ten days later he took a running leap off the Hyatt's roof and landed in the Comedy Store parking lot. He had a note in his pocket: 'My name is Steve Lubetkin. I was a comedian.' "

delanceyplace.com 1/16/12 - michael luther king changes his name

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 03:35:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - Mike King changes his name. Born Michael Luther King (1899 - 1984), he had lifted himself up from extreme poverty and a complete lack of schooling to lead Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and to take it from the brink of financial ruin to prosperity—in the bleak middle of the Depression. His eldest son, Michael Luther King Jr., who we now remember as Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 - 1968), was then known as 'M.L.' or 'Little Mike'. The change was intended to honor Martin Luther (1483 - 1546), the great German founder of the "protestant" reformation of Christianity in the 1500s—and thus elevate Mike and his son through that association:

"He was simply Mike King—always shaking hands, encouraging and demanding, making himself the center of attention in any room, full of claims about the past and promises for the future. The key to his multiple roles and identities was always Ebenezer Church. ...

"He could safely say that he rescued Ebenezer Baptist Church from bankruptcy within his first few months as pastor. Membership increased geometrically from two hundred toward a Depression peak of four thousand. His gamble paid off so handsomely that the church made him the highest-paid Negro minister in Atlanta at the end of his first year. ... [He] asked his membership to send him on a summer-long tour of Europe, Africa, and the Holy Land. ... Reverend King's triumphant homecoming in late August 1934 was announced to Negro Atlanta in a banner headline in the Daily World: 'Reverend King is Royally Welcomed on Return from Europe.' ...

"This was King's moment, the watershed of his life, and he honored the occasion by changing his name from Michael to Martin, becoming Martin Luther King. For consistency, he also changed the name of his older son to Martin Luther King, Jr. The change of name was one of the most important events in the younger King's early life ..."

delanceyplace.com 1/13/12 - women in the american west

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - life for men in the American West of the late 1800s was hard. Farming and ranching were high-risk, near subsistence activities, and mining, a predominent activity throughout the West after the California gold rush, was riskier and favored only the very few. For women, it was it was even more difficult:

"...[I]t was worse - much worse - for women in mining camps or anywhere else in the West. A man all by himself in the territories was still respectable; most women on their own were prostitutes. For them, life's choices were reduced to a single goal: Attach themselves to men and get out of the business, or soon grow old and sick and die. In the few fancy territorial towns like Virginia City, some bordellos were high-class, with attractive young females available for high dollar prices, and bouncers on hand to forcibly remove any customer who misbehaved.

"But in most camps, weary women turned tricks in shabby cribs and regularly endured violence at the hands of their clients. Many turned to drugs. Morphine and laudanum were the most popular. A sense of desperation was pervasive -the suicide rate among frontier prostitutes was always high. Their one advantage was that, in the Western territories, women were so scarce as to almost always have some value no matter how battered they might be. Men who wanted sex on a regular, unpaid basis, and who yearned for someone to wash their clothes, clean their shacks, cook their meals, and perhaps bear their children did not have a wide selection from which to choose. Not all the available women in the West were practicing prostitutes, but many were. And men looking for wives in the territories were not always great bargains themselves.

"The results, often, were partnerships rather than love matches. Few couples were joined formally in any religious or legal ceremony; among people of limited means, common-law marriages were the rule. The woman involved might take the man's last name, and sign herself 'Mrs.' She had some stability and safety, unless or until her husband tired of her. Then he could break off the relationship without any legal complications. Courts would never rule in favor of an abandoned common-law wife. Ultimately, the advantage was with the man.

"While a man and woman lived together as common-law husband and wife, no one questioned their standing as a couple. But in territorial towns of any consequence, there would always be a small, select upper class of investors and merchants, and these men often did bring wives with them, women who were married in every legal sense. Formally married women might associate in a reasonably friendly fashion with common-law wives, chatting with them on the streets or in shops or in church, but they would rarely invite them into their homes. Men in the West, no matter what their backgrounds, could always aspire to a higher place in society. Women were far more limited in rising above whatever they had been."

delanceyplace.com 1/12/12 - the wonders of american vaudeville

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - vaudeville, the circuit of variety acts that went from town to town from the early 1880s until the early 1930s and was America's preeminent form of entertainment - until it was swept aside by the ascendance of cinema and radio. In the 1920s, Louise Hovick, later world famous as the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, was hustled from one theater to the next, overshadowed by her baby sister June, dominated by her mother Rose, deprived of teachers and dental care, but exposed to the assortment of oddities and wonders only the world of vaudeville could provide:

"Louise was the only child of hers who'd spent any time, no matter how brief, in a formal classroom, but Rose believed the circuit taught everything they - and she - needed to know. Consistency was the key to success in vaudeville, polishing an act until it became the prettiest, shiniest version of itself. Consider how many times Chaz Chase, the 'Eater of Strange Things,' consumed lit matches in order to make the trick appear effortless, or the practice schedule of Hadji Ali, the master regurgitator, famous for swallowing a gallon of water followed by a pint of kerosene. After his assistant set up a small metal castle a few feet away, Hadji Ali spat the kerosene in a six-foot stream and set the structure ablaze. He then opened his throat and, with the aim and velocity of a fire hose, purged the water and killed every flame.

"These sorts of acts dominated the circuit, vaudevillians possessed of talents invented rather than innate. The man who guzzled hot molten lava and belched up coins, the man who swallowed a goldfish and a baby shark and asked the audience which should reappear first, the man who lit gunpowder on his tongue, the man who discovered that his sneeze made audiences laugh and worked it into his routine, honing, over the course of a year, the mechanics of twitching his nostrils and cranking his jaw, the exaggerated intake of breath and sputtering of lips. A performer called 'The Human Fish' ate a banana, played a trombone, and read a newspaper while submerged in a tank of water. Another had a 'cat piano,' an act featuring live cats in wire cages that meowed Gregorio Allegri's Miserere when their tails were pulled (in reality the performer yanked on artificial tails and did all the meowing himself).

"Alonzo the Miracle Man lit and smoked a cigarette, brushed his teeth and combed his hair, and buttoned his shirt - miracles since he had been born without arms. Louise and June were particularly fond of Lady Alice, an old dowager who wore elegant beaded gowns and peformed with rats. The runt settled on the crown of her head, a miniature kazoo clenched between teeth like grains of rice. He breathed a tuneless harmony while the rest of the litter began a slow parade across Lady Alice's outstretched arms, marching from the tip of one middle finger to the other. The girls never understood how Lady Alice controlled the rodents - their own animals weren't quite so obedient - until one day she revealed her secret: a trail of Cream of Wheat slathered on her neck and shoulders.

"Vaudevillians called these signature bits 'insurance,' gimmicks they kept tucked away in their repertoire, always close at hand if a new routine failed. (Fred Astaire once learned this lesson the hard way, when he was replaced by a dog act.) Child performers were considered the surest bet of all; 'kids,' June said, 'were an automatic gimmick.' "

delanceyplace.com 1/11/12 - the importance of forgetting

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - total recall, the ability of someone to remember every word they read or hear, has often been lauded as tantamount to a high level of intelligence. The opposite is more often the case. Those with total recall often have difficulty making decisions, and more readily miss understanding the overall point of a book or lecture - because they get enmeshed in an undistinguishable mass of irrelevant details. Forgetting, it turns out, has enormous value for concise understanding and for emotional health:

"Solomon Shereshevsky could recite entire speeches, word for word, after hearing them once. In minutes, he memorized complex math formulas, passages in foreign languages and tables consisting of 50 numbers or nonsense syllables. The traces of these sequences were so durably etched in his brain that he could reproduce them years later, according to Russian psychologist Alexander R. Luria, who wrote about the man he called, simply, 'S' in The Mind of a Mnemonist.

"But the weight of all the memories, piled up and overlapping in his brain, created crippling confusion. S could not fathom the meaning of a story, because the words got in the way. 'No,' [S] would say. 'This is too much. Each word calls up images; they collide with one another, and the result is chaos. I can't make anything out of this.' When S was asked to make decisions, as chair of a union group, he could not parse the situation as a whole, tripped up as he was on irrelevant details. He made a living performing feats of recollection.

"Yet he desperately wanted to forget. In one futile attempt, he wrote down items he wanted purged from his mind and burned the paper. Although S's efforts to rein in his memory were unusually vigilant, we all need - and often struggle - to forget. "Human memory is pretty good," says cognitive neuro-scientist Benjamin J. Levy of Stanford Univer- sity. "The problem with our memories is not that nothing comes to mind-but that irrelevant stuff comes to mind."

"The act of forgetting crafts and hones data in the brain as if carving a statue from a block of marble. It enables us to make sense of the world by clearing a path to the thoughts that are truly valuable. It also aids emotional recovery. 'You want to forget embarrassing things,' says cognitive neuroscientist Zara Bergstrom of the University of Cambridge. 'Or if you argue with your partner, you want to move on.' In recent years researchers have amassed evidence for our ability to willfully forget. They have sketched out a neural circuit underlying this skill analogous to the one that inhibits impulsive actions.

"The emerging data provide the first scientific support for Sigmund Freud's controversial theory of repression, by which unwanted memories are shoved into the subconscious. The new evidence suggests that the ability to repress is quite useful. Those who cannot do this well tend to let thoughts stick in their mind. They ruminate, which can pave a path to depression. Weak restraints on memory may similarly impede the emotional recovery of trauma victims. Lacking brakes on mental intrusions, individuals with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are also more likely to be among the forgetless (to coin a term). In short, memory - and forgetting - can shape your personality."

delanceyplace.com 1/10/12 - increasing your stature by writing a book

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the Kennedy family was ruled with an iron hand by John and Bobby Kennedy's father—reputed bootlegger and multi-millionaire Ambassador Joe Kennedy. It was Joe's ambitions that pushed John to run for President, and Joe's money and acumen that guided the campaign. And it was Joe's idea that his sons should try and increase their own stature by having books ghostwritten for them and then published under their own names—a practice then radical but now commonplace. Although Ted Sorenson was the primary author of John Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, and John Seigenthaler was the primary author of Bobby Kennedy's The Enemy Within, Joe was not pleased when anyone suspected that someone other than his boys were the authors. Still, the boys were able to assert their independence from the father in subtle ways:

"One newspaperman closer to the [Presidential campaign] action than most in July 1960] was John Seigenthaler. A reporter for the Nashville Tennessean who supplied Bob leads on union violence around the border states during the Rackets Committee investigations, in 1959 the courtly young Seigenthaler had taken a leave of absence to join Bob in the deserted summer manse at Hickory Hill and help grind out Bobby's memoir about labor corruption, The Enemy Within. The Tennessean was backing Lyndon Johnson, and in 1960 sent Seigenthaler out to Los Angeles to forage for inside dope around the Kennedy camp. ...

"Soon after that, Bobby was able to lean on his father to let Seigenthaler through the gates of the Davies property [in Los Angeles where Joe Kennedy was staying during the nominating convention] for a personal interview. 'The old man had run the Los Angeles Times' guy off the premises a day earlier, so this was a big deal,' Seigenthaler laughs now.

"Less than a year earlier, Seigenthaler had joined Bobby for a couple of dinners with the crusty Ambassador at Pavilion, the sumptuous Manhattan eatery in which the father reportedly owned a percentage. Joe Kennedy was fidgeting on the inside seat of a banquette, upset, as he told them immediately, 'because he thought Ted Sorensen had taken too much credit for writing Profiles in Courage,' the book of sketches for which the Ambassador had finagled the Pulitzer Prize for Jack.

" 'He began to lecture me about loyalty,' Seigenthaler remembers, 'and ego, and ambition. I was a little slow; I didn't know whether he was talking to his son or to me.' Ed Sullivan, the television impresario, was at the next table, 'and the next thing I know, he's got Sullivan entering into the lecture. When I finally got it I said, 'Look, this is your son's book, I've agreed to help edit... we signed a contract, and I'm perfectly satisfied.' The financier calmed down little by little, flaring up again at the end of the meal at the maitre d' because he had been charged $10 for two saucers of ice cream.

"When they next met, again at Pavilion, The Enemy Within was out and doing quite well. Robert Kennedy inscribed Seigenthaler's first edition on the way in from the airport. It was a celebratory evening, with champagne toasts and the Ambassador holding forth about how 'you fellas knew exactly what you were doing, you never took your eye off the ball, everybody I've talked to thinks it's a great book....

" 'And Bob says, 'John, show Dad how I signed your book.' ' Seigenthaler handed it over. Bob had written: 'To John Seigenthaler. Who wrote my book for me.'

"Glowering, the founding father looked up. 'Bobby,' he erupted, 'you're a goddamn fool. That'll be in the New York Post in two weeks!'

" 'He was sending his father a little needling message,' Seigenthaler says, 'and he laughed, and I laughed, and finally the old man laughed too.' "

delanceyplace.com 1/9/12 - sammy davis, jr. and the harsh road to fame

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Sammy Davis, Jr. was "short, maimed, ugly, black, Jewish, gaudy, [and] uneducated," yet through unmatched determination was perhaps the greatest American entertainer of them all - a superstar of song, stage and screen:

"Sammy Davis Jr. was the kind of guy about whom God seemed not to have been able to make up his mind. On the face of things, by his own reckoning, he had more strikes against him than you could count - he was short, maimed, ugly, black, Jewish, gaudy, uneducated. But he could do anything: song, dance, pantomime, impressions, jokes, and even, in a manner of speaking, drama. He overcame so much that his merely being there among them was an epochal triumph: He was the Jackie Robinson of showbiz.

"And yet when he saw himself in a mirror he was disgusted: 'I gotta get bigger,' he'd implore himself. 'I gotta get better.'

"He was so used to being excluded that he was willing to kill himself with work to be let in. He'd suffer all manner of indignities: Frank's clumsy racial jokes; years of Jim Crow treatment in theaters, hotels, and restaurants; the nigger-baiting of high-rolling southerners in Vegas casinos; a patently bogus marriage to a black dancer intended to quiet journalists about his taste for white girls; the explicit disdain of mobsters and other bosses. But he kept at it, convinced that sheer will and talent would stop the world saying no.

"Who was he trying to impress? His mother, a showgirl, was a cipher in his life, a ghost whose approval he never seems to have missed; his father, a small-time song-and-dance man, he eclipsed when still a boy. All the know-it-alls, naysayers, and bigots who'd ever discouraged him he'd silenced with sheer talent, guts, and drive. The gods themselves nodded with pleasure upon him: 'This kid's the greatest entertainer,' declared Groucho Marx at Hollywood's Jewish mecca of leisure, the Hillcrest Country Club, one afternoon, 'and this goes for you, too, Jolson' (to which Jolie merely responded with a smile). He was not only the first black man through the door but one of the all-time greats, regardless of origin.

"Yet he felt hollow: All the money and fame and sex and sycophants in the world still couldn't squelch the nagging inner sense that he was a nothing - and that if he could only rouse a little more out of himself, he could finally be a something. He sang that he was '133 pounds of confidence,' that he was 'Gonna Build a Mountain,' that he had 'a lot of livin' to do,' and he sounded like he meant it. But each garish boast gave off a vibe of whistling past a graveyard; in his heart of hearts, he could never vanquish the sense that all the work he'd done to get so far could be snuffed out by a mere wave of Fate's lordly white hand."

delanceyplace.com 1/6/12 - the cure for a recession

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in a recession, it is the widespread assumption of politicians, citizens and economists that government intervention is required to return the economy to prosperity. There is an different line of thought, however, that states that recessions are an inevitable result of excesses (e.g., the overbuilding and related overlending that brought about our current crisis), and that government intervention simply prolongs the period required to "write-down" or otherwise absorb these excesses.

One such alternative theory is the Austrian school of economic thought, espoused by such authors as Ludwig von Mises and his economic disciple Murray Rothbard. Rothbard notes that the Great Depression began early in the term of President Herbert Hoover, and that Hoover spent 3.5 years aggressively intervening in the economy in a way never previously done, and as a direct result greatly exacerbated and prolonged the Depression - before handing the worsened crisis over to Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt's famous New Deal programs were largely just an elaboration of Hoover's . For example, Rothbard notes that in U.S. depressions prior to 1929, employers simply reduced wages instead of instituting massive layoffs, and un- employment remained relatively low as a result. Wages were raised with the recovery. He argues that only with the widespread introduction of minimum wages were employers forced to lay off employees in large numbers, which led to unprecedented unemployment rate of 25% during the depths of the Great Depression:

"If government wishes to alleviate, rather than aggravate, a depression, its only valid course is laissez-faire-to leave the economy alone. Only if there is no interference, direct or threatened, with prices, wage rates, and business liquidation will the necessary adjustment proceed with smooth dispatch. Any propping up of shaky positions postpones liquidation and aggravates unsound conditions. Propping up wage rates creates mass unemployment, and bolstering prices perpetuates and creates unsold surpluses. Moreover, a drastic cut in the government budget - both in taxes and expenditures - will of itself speed adjustment by changing social choice toward more saving and investment relative to consumption. For government spending, whatever the label attached to it, is solely consumption; any cut in the budget therefore raises the investment-consumption ratio in the economy and allows more rapid validation of originally wasteful and loss-yielding projects. Hence, the proper injunction to government in a depression is cut the budget and leave the economy strictly alone. Currently fashionable economic thought considers such a dictum hopelessly outdated; instead, it has more substantial backing now in economic law than it did during the nineteenth century.

"Laissez-faire was, roughly, the traditional policy in American depressions before 1929. The laissez-faire precedent was set in America's first great depression, 1819, when the federal government's only act was to ease terms of payment for its own land debtors. President Van Buren also set a staunch laissez-faire course, in the Panic of 1837. Subsequent federal governments followed a similar path, the chief sinners being state governments which periodically permitted insolvent banks to continue in operation without paying their obligations. In the 1920-1921 depression, government intervened to a greater extent, but wage rates were permitted to fall, and government expenditures and taxes were reduced. And this depression was over in one year -in what Dr. Benjamin M. Anderson has called 'our last natural recovery to full employment.'

"Laissez-faire, then, was the policy dictated both by sound theory and by historical precedent. But in 1929, the sound course was rudely brushed aside. Led by President Hoover, the government embarked on what Anderson has accurately called the 'Hoover New Deal.' For if we define 'New Deal' as an antidepression program marked by extensive governmental economic planning and intervention - including bolstering of wage rates and prices, expansion of credit, propping up of weak firms, and increased government spending (e.g., subsidies to unemployment and public works) - Herbert Clark Hoover must be considered the founder of the New Deal in America. Hoover, from the very start of the depression, set his course unerringly toward the violation of all the laissez-faire canons. As a consequence, he left office with the economy at the depths of an unprecedented depression, with no recovery in sight after three and a half years, and with unemployment at the terrible and unprecedented rate of 25 percent of the labor force.

"Hoover's role as founder of a revolutionary program of government planning to combat depression has been unjustly neglected by historians. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in large part, merely elaborated the policies laid down by his predecessor. To scoff at Hoover's tragic failure to cure the depression as a typical example of laissez-faire is drastically to misread the historical record. The Hoover rout must be set down as a failure of government planning and not of the free market."

delanceyplace.com 1/5/12 - the taj mahal, a muslim masterpiece

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the Taj Mahal, the architectural masterpiece of the Islamic ruler of India, Shah Jehan, was built using artisans from Baghdad, Constantinople, and other centers of the Muslim faith. Jehan spent the last years of his life viewing his masterpiece from a jail cell:

"A brutal, wasteful, and ruthless emperor, who ordered the killing of all his male relations who might possibly claim the throne, Shah Jehan (ruled 1627-1658 CE) also had a passion for architecture, and he imported Italian artists who taught his craftsmen the art of inlaying marble with a mosaic of precious stones. He built forts with luxurious halls bearing panels of Florentine mosaic on black marble, as well as ceilings and arches carved with such skill they looked like lace. However, he is mostly remembered for the hauntingly beautiful Taj Mahal, a tribute to his eternal love for his beauteous queen, Mumtaz Mahal (Exalted of the Palace). Mumtaz gave her husband fourteen children in eighteen years and died in childbirth at the age of thirty-nine.

"In 1632, the mausoleum was built for the queen by the inconsolable Shah Jehan. There is no trace of Hindu influence. Artisans were brought from Baghdad, Constantinople, and other centers of the Muslim faith. It took twenty-two years and twenty-two thousand laborers and craftsmen from India, Asia, and Europe to build the white marble Taj. The building is set in a Persian landscaped garden on the banks of the Yamuna River. The Taj Mahal is exquisitely proportioned, with minarets and a central dome mirrored in a reflecting pool. It features perforated marble grilles, semiprecious stones (including jasper, lapis lazuli, and bloodstone) inlaid in marble, as well as arabesques and chevrons. There is hardly a break between the stones. One flower an inch square can have sixty different inlays. The Taj Mahal reflects the varying moods of night and day: brilliant and dazzling at noon, warm and glowing at dusk, and ethereal in the moonlight. The main entrance was once guarded with heavy silver gates. The stone carving is of alabaster lace, beautiful and sublime with delicate detail.

"Another legendary work of art created at this time was the Peacock Throne, which took seven years to complete. It was legendary for its components of precious metals and stones. Four legs of gold supported the seat, and twelve pillars of emeralds held up the enameled canopy, while each pillar bore two peacocks glittering with rubies and pearls. Between the peacocks was a tree, covered with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and pearls. The fabled throne was carried off to Persia in 1739 by Nadir Shah and then was gradually dismantled to pay off the expenses of the royal personages.

"Yet another project on a grand scale, the Red Fort (Lal Kila) - of red sandstone - was built in Delhi in 1640. It includes towering ramparts, factories, storehouses, military barracks, stables, and a mint. It housed thousands of servants, courtiers, and princesses. A magnificent mosque, Jama Masjid, was built facing the main entrance. Every Friday, tens of thousands of Muslims in India still gather here to pray at noon.

"Shah Jehan, the most lavish spender of the Moghul emperors, ruled for three decades. He began his reign by killing his brothers but neglected to kill his sons, one of whom, Aurangzeb, not only overthrew him but imprisoned him. Shah Jehan languished in prison for eight years, looking sorrowfully through a grille at his creation, the Taj Mahal, where the body of his beloved rested."

delanceyplace.com 1/4/12 - we are blind to our blindness

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - we only have the capacity to focus on a limited number of things at a given moment - in essence we have a limited budget which we can only allocate so far. So sometimes when we concentrate on one thing, we are often completely blind to other things - even if it is a woman dressed in a gorilla suit right in front of us:

"The often-used phrase 'pay attention' is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is difficult or impossible to conduct several at once. You could not compute the product of 17 x 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic, and you certainly should not try. You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. You are probably safe carrying on a conversation with a passenger while driving on an empty highway, and many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.

"Everyone has some awareness of the limited capacity of attention, and our social behavior makes allowances for these limitations. When the driver of a car is overtaking a truck on a narrow road, for example, adult passengers quite sensibly stop talking. They know that distracting the driver is not a good idea, and they also suspect that he is temporarily deaf and will not hear what they say.

"Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention. The most dramatic demonstration was offered by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book The Invisible Gorilla. They constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black. The viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. This task is difficult and completely absorbing. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. The gorilla is in view for 9 seconds.

"Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of them do not notice anything unusual. It is the counting task-and especially the instruction to ignore one of the teams-that causes the blindness. No one who watches the video without that task would miss the gorilla. Seeing and orienting are automatic functions of System 1, but they depend on the allocation of some attention to the relevant stimulus. The authors note that the most remarkable observation of their study is that people find its results very surprising. Indeed, the viewers who fail to see the gorilla are initially sure that it was not there - they cannot imagine missing such a striking event. The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness."

delanceyplace.com 1/3/12 - the arrival of commodore perry brings civil war

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:55:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the unexpected arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan in 1853 ended centuries of Japanese isolation and brought a realization as to how far behind the world their technology had fallen - they had nothing but swords to counter the cannons and guns of the Americans. The Japanese acquiesced to a treaty with the Americans, but the outrage and humiliation resulting from this treaty led to fifteen years of civil war, brutal murder and assassinations within Japan. During these times, "mobs gathered in the large cities, including Edo (Tokyo) itself, carrying Shinto images, visiting shrines, dancing half-naked in the streets, having sex in public, and raiding wealthy houses, while shouting in a state of quasi-religious ecstasy: 'It's okay, it's okay, anything we do is okay' ":

"The [House of] Tokugawa (also known as the Tokugawa Bakufu or simply the Bakufu) ruled Japan more or less peacefully for two and a half centuries. To maintain this peace, the Bakufu had strictly enforced a policy of national isolation since 1635. But the end of this halcyon era approached as the social, political, and economic structures of the outside world underwent major changes. The British colonies in North America declared independence in 1776. The remnants of feudalism in Europe were obliterated by the French Revolution in 1789 and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars. The nineteenth century heralded the age of European and North American capitalism and, with it, rapid advances in science, industry, and technology. The development of the steamship in the early part of the nineteenth century served the expansionist purposes of Western nations. Colonization of Asian countries by European powers surged. In 1818 Great Britain subjugated much of India. Through the Treaty of Nanking, which ended the first Opium War in 1842, the British acquired Hong Kong.

"The foreign menace reached Japan on June 3 of the sixth year of the era named Kaei - July 8,1853, on the Gregorian calendar. It was on that day that Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy led a squadron of heavily armed warships into Edo Bay, off the shogun's capital, eventually forcing an end to Japanese isolation and inciting fifteen years of bloody turmoil across the island nation. Perry carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore demanding a treaty between the United States and Japan. After months of stormy and unprecedented debate among samurai and daimyo [the warriors and their feudal lords] both within and outside the Tokugawa camp, and even including members of the general populace, the authorities eventually yielded to Perry's gunboat diplomacy. In March 1854, the first year of the era of An-sei, Japan relinquished its policy of isolationism and signed the so-called Treaty of Peace and Amity with the Americans. Similar treaties with England, Holland, France, and Russia followed. Two ports were opened - one at Shimoda, not far from Edo; the other at Hakodate, on the far-northern island of Ezo.

"Samurai throughout Japan were outraged over the humiliation they suffered at the hands of the foreigners. The situation was tersely explained by one who rose above this outrage in order to deal with the unprecedented and pressing dangers facing Japan. 'Since the time that the American warships arrived at Uraga in 1853, public opinion became divided between the advocates of war and peace, so that a decision could not be made either way,' Katsu Kaishu wrote four decades later, in a brief chronicle of the origin and downfall of the Tokugawa Bakufu. Kaishu was an expert swordsman who never drew his sword on an adversary. He was a philosopher-statesman, founder of the Japanese navy, and, during those dangerous times, probably the most valuable personage in the entire Edo regime. 'At that time the Bakufu decided to open the country, and gradually did so. There were many people, including feudal lords, who resented this. They said that the Bakufu was forced by the barbarians to open the country because of its cowardice and weakness, and that this was why the Bakufu submitted to this humiliation. They no longer believed in the Bakufu. There was heated argument everywhere. People were killing foreigners, and assassinating government officials."

delanceyplace.com 1/2/12 - the spiritual beauty of wabi-sabi

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:25:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic whereby greatness exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details, and beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is central to the idea of Japanese beauty and has the same importance to Japanese aesthetic values as the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection do in Western thought:

"Truth comes from the observation of nature. The Japanese have tried to control nature where they could, as best they could, within the limits of available technology. But there was little they could do about the weather - hot and humid summers, cold and dry winters, and rain on the average of one out of every three days throughout the year, except during the rainy season in early summer when everything is engulfed in a fine wet mist for six to eight weeks. And there was little they could do about the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, floods, fires, and tidal waves that periodically and unpredictably visited their land. The Japanese didn't particularly trust nature, but they learned from it. Three of the most obvious lessons gleaned from millennia of contact with nature (and leavened with Taoist thought) were incorporated into the wisdom of wabi-sabi.

1. All things are impermanent. The inclination toward nothingness is unrelenting and universal. Even things that have all the earmarks of substance - things that are hard, inert, solid present nothing more than the illusion of permanence. We may wear blinders, use ruses to forget, ignore, or pretend otherwise - but all comes to nothing in the end. Everything wears down. The planets and stars, and even intangible things like reputation, family heritage, historical memory, scientific theorems, mathematical proofs, great art and literature (even in digital form) - all eventually fade into oblivion and nonexistence.

2. All things are imperfect. Nothing that exists is without imperfections. When we look really closely at things we see the flaws. The sharp edge of a razor blade, when magnified, reveals microscopic pits, chips, and variegations. Every craftsman knows the limits of perfection: the imperfections glare back. And as things begin to break down and approach the primordial state, they become even less perfect, more irregular.

3. All things are incomplete. All things, including the universe itself, are in a constant, never-ending state of becoming or dissolving. Often we arbitrarily designate moments, points along the way, as 'finished' or 'complete.' But when does something's destiny finally come to fruition? Is the plant complete when it flowers? When it goes to seed? When the seeds sprout? When everything turns into compost? The notion of completion has no basis in wabi-sabi.

" 'Greatness' exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details. Wabi-sabi represents the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular, and enduring. Wabi-sabi is not found in nature at moments of bloom and lushness, but at moments of inception or subsiding. Wabi-sabi is not about gorgeous flowers, majestic trees, or bold landscapes. Wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes. ...

"The essence of wabi-sabi is apportioned in small doses. As the dose decreases, the effect becomes more potent, more profound. The closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become. Consequently to experience wabi-sabi means you have to slow way down, be patient, and look very closely.

"Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness. The beauty of wabi-sabi is, in one respect, the condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace."

delanceyplace.com 12/30/11 - the irresistible nexus of cat, cuisine, and christmas

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - The Delanceyplace.com end-of-year cuisine week!
Encore excerpt favorites on food to fill the blissful week between Christmas and New Years

The Siege of Paris or L'Annee Terrible was the overthrow and humiliation of Paris in 1870 by Bismarck after France had declared war on Prussia. Food supplies became so short that one man reported he was fattening up a large cat which he planned to serve up on Christmas Day 'surrounded with mice like sausages.' The Siege occurred because France, still limping from the excesses of Napoleon, showed enough hubris to declare war on Prussia over a mere diplomatic incident—the proposed placement of a German prince on the Spanish throne ('The Liberal Empire goes to war on a mere point of etiquette'). Bismarck judged rightly that a war on France would enable him to bond together the loose structure of the German federation into a truly unified nation. Bismarck won after a siege that brought Parisians to the cruel brink of starvation and he extracted as reparations Alsace, Lorraine and five billion francs - a price which bitterly helped lead to both World Wars. Upon the German's departure, France imploded into a civil war that left 25,000 Parisians dead—more than in the Terror itself:

"Early in October [1870], even bourgeois Paris had turned to horsemeat. ... As hunger tightened its grip, so many a splendid champion of the turf came to a well-spiced end in the casserole. Among them were two trotting horses presented by the Tsar to Louis Napoleon at the time of the Great Exposition, originally valued at 56,000 francs, now bought by a butcher for 800. It was in mid-November, however, that supplies of fresh meat were exhausted - and it was then that Parisians invented the exotic menus with which the siege will always be linked. The signs 'Feline and Canine Butchers' made their first appearance. To begin with, dog-loving Parisians objected fiercely to slaughtering domestic pets for human consumption, but soon necessity overcame their fastidiousness. By mid-December [columnist] Henry Labouchere ... was telling his readers 'I had a slice of spaniel the other day,' adding that it made him 'feel like a cannibal.' A week later he reported that he had encountered a man who was fattening up a large cat which he planned to serve up on Christmas Day 'surrounded with mice, like sausages.' ...

"And then it was rats. Along with the carrier-pigeon, the rat was to become the most fabled animal of the Siege of Paris, and from December the National Guard spent much of its time engaged in vigorous rat-hunts. ... The elaborate sauces that were necessary to render them edible meant that rats were essentially a rich man's dish—hence the notorious menus of the Jockey Club which featured such delicacies as salmis de rats and rat pie.

"As the weeks passed, Parisian diets grew even more outlandish as the zoos started to offer up their animals. ... By early January [a young Englishman named Tommy Bowles] was noting 'I have now dined off camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule, and elephant, which I approve in the order in which I have written, ... horse is really too disgusting, and it has a peculiar taste never to be forgotten.' His was not the only palate that became more discriminating: there was a significant variation in price between brewery and sewer rats. ... A lamb offered to one British correspondent ironically proved to be a wolf. ...

"Oddly enough there was never any shortage of wine or other alcohol."

delanceyplace.com 12/29/11 - class at the culinary institute

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

The Delanceyplace.com end-of-year cuisine week!
Encore excerpt favorites on food to fill the blissful week between Christmas and New Years

In today's encore excerpt - the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), perhaps the finest chef college in the world, includes among its many courses a class in killing the animals that will later be served. Jonathan Dixon, a student at the Hyde Park, New York, campus, describes the experience:

"[My classmates] Adam, Lombardi, and I all signed up to go and kill animals the following Friday. Meat class would be over, and we'd be in the thick of fish class - Seafood Identification and Fabrication. But this was something necessary. If I really asked myself some tough questions, which I did in the days going forward, I realized that the truism was right: Unless you're a vegan or hard-core vegetarian, if you are going to consume animal flesh, then you should kill an animal. Not just watch the killing and the flow of blood, not be an observer, but touch an animal and end its life. ...

"The farm [where the class would be held] had a dirt driveway that cut through green fields, and a few yards down from the road a sign read WELCOME CIA STUDENTS AND BROOK FARM FRIENDS. For most of the ride, the four of us in the car had talked food, [famous restaurateur] Thomas Keller and the cult of celebrity, run down other students we didn't care for, and generally avoided the topic of killing. With the farmhouse in sight the conversation swerved down a darker bend; we made jokes that weren't all that funny and laughed too hard at them. We parked the car, gathered the knives, and took heavy steps to the backyard.

"As we walked toward a set of tables to put our things down, we passed a mobile chicken coop, presumably filled with the work at hand. A dozen or so feet beyond that was a fifty-five-gallon drum full of bubbling water on top of a propane burner, and next to it a cylindrical tube with finger-sized rubber pieces extruding off the interior sides and on the bottom. Nearby were a few tubs filled with water. And throwing their shadows onto the tables were six traffic cones upended and nailed to a crossbeam. ... I had a good idea what the traffic cones were for. Beneath the cones, someone had dug a trench about six inches deep. On this assembly line, no one part of the process was more than a few feet from another. ...

"By the coop there were two wooden cages. The [farm owner] took a few of us to the coop, crawled inside, and handed out chickens two at a time. Six chickens were put into each cage. The cages were carried back to the cross- beams; we reached in and each picked up a chicken by its feet and held it upside down - if held that way long enough, chickens go into a trance; they'll fight you, though, when you first try to turn them feet up. Once they were sedated, we drew them headfirst through one of the cones. Sebald spoke his softly accented instructions: Hold the head with your thumb under the chicken's beak. Put the bottom end of the knife blade against the bird's throat. Draw the blade across, applying firm, even pressure. The head should pop right off. All of us stood thronged together, knives in hand, waiting. The first bird went into the cone. ...

"That first bird: a young woman from school was the first to kill, and it didn't go as well as it could have. The knife seemed to stick; the bird freaked out; she responded in kind but got the knife through the neck. She had blood running down her cheeks and held the head in her hand. She was blameless; it's hard for your hands to know what to do. In the cluster of students around her, I saw one of the teaching assistants from school, her eyes also shining with tears. Most of us were shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. I held my knife with a tight grip. Other students were reaching into the cages and pulling out the chickens. I watched people lifting the birds up, watched their wings flap frantically, heard them squawking, saw them being killed. ...

"My turn came. I could feel the bird's pulse under my thumb. I positioned the knife as instructed and drew it hard across the chicken's throat. And then I was holding its head in my hand, blood on my arms and shirt, watching the body convulse. My foot slipped and slid into the trench. My work boot was glistening with blood.

"The body was dunked into the same hot water that had cooked the corn. When the feathers began pulling away, it was removed from the water and put into the cylinder. The cylinder whipped the bird around and the rubber extrusions pulled away the feathers. Any feathers left were plucked by hand at a nearby table. Then we gutted the chickens, the viscera still hot. The carcass was then washed and put into a tub. We went through this for hours, until past dusk, stopping when the hundredth chicken was finished. ...

"At the end of the [class], the husband and wife [who owned the farm] asked us to gather in a circle and tell them what we'd learned. One by one, we each mouthed the same platitudes about respect for food, being closer to the food source, and like that. But what I actually learned I still only feel."

delanceyplace.com 12/28/11 - the decline of french cuisine

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:14:00 -0500

The Delanceyplace.com end-of-year cuisine week!
Encore excerpt favorites on food to fill the blissful week between Christmas and New Years

In today's encore excerpt - as reported by Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books, French cuisine is declining in its creativity and influence:

"The statistics tell much of the story: in 1960, there were 200,000 cafés in France, now there are about 30,000, an average of two closing every day; the French home meal a generation ago took 88 minutes to prepare, now it's 38 minutes; the great majority of French cheeses were unpasteurized in the 1950s, now only 10 per cent are made from raw milk; French family-owned wineries and farms have been going out of business at an alarming rate, and the pro- portion of the labor force employed in agriculture has dropped from 20 per cent in the 1960s to about 5 per cent today. And you surely have to give atten- tion to some of the good things that have also eroded traditional foodways in France, as they have in many other countries: for example, slightly better pay for restaurant workers and the unshackling of women from the domestic kitchen. In Distinction (1979), Pierre Bourdieu addressed the declining 'taste for elaborate casserole dishes (pot-au-feu, blanquette, daube)' in terms of women's changing role in France, and also as an illustration of the concept of 'cultural capital'. Your food is supposed to get lighter as you move up in the world.

"The second most profitable national market for McDonald's is now France. The Great Satan of dietary mondialization is now woven into the fabric of French life and, while Au Revoir to All That: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine author Michael Steinberger has no taste for fast-food malbouffe, he also has no time for the facile notion that this is a story about Americanization: 'The quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin' it - the architects of McDonald's strategy in France were French.' The French buy 'Les Big Macs' because they like them. McDonald's French executives have successfully argued that it is a French company, supplying emerging French needs, adjusting its facilities to French habits, and sourcing its beef, bread and condiments from impeccably French sources. One of McDonald's advertising campaigns posed the question 'D'où vient ton McDo?', since the company was happy to supply the answer.

"American and British foodies appear at times 'plus royaliste que le roi', reminding French food culture what it owes to the world and, specifically, to those whose lives were turned inside out by a French epiphany. Steinberger visited Philippe Alléosse, owner of perhaps the best cheese shop in Paris. Shopkeeper and foodie shared their alarm over the decline of raw-milk cheeses and the rise of industrial junk, and then Alléosse told Steinberger where he thought the blame lay: 'No French chefs come to visit here. We get foreign chefs, but no French chefs. The French think that good cheese is too expensive. It is the Americans and other foreigners who support quality. I have Americans coming into the store saying: "Philippe, you must continue, you must protect lait cru cheeses, you have the best métier in the world." I never hear that from French people.' Here, as elsewhere, the natural allies of terroir and Slow Food are the technologies of globalisation: the internet and the 747."

delanceyplace.com 12/27/11 - the mysteries of mushrooms

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:10:00 -0500

The Delanceyplace.com end-of-year cuisine week!
Encore excerpt favorites on food to fill the blissful week between Christmas and New Years

In today's encore excerpt - mushrooms are still a mystery to us:

"We don't know the most basic things about mushrooms.

"Part of the problem is simply that fungi are very difficult to observe. What we call a mushroom is only the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger and essentially invisible organism that lives most of its life underground. The mushroom is the 'fruiting body' of a subterranean network of microscopic hyphae, improbably long rootlike cells that thread themselves through the soil like neurons. Bunched like cables, the hyphae form webs of (still microscopic) mycelium. Mycologists can't dig up a mushroom like a plant to study its structure because its mycelium is too tiny and delicate to tease from the soil without disintegrating. ... To see the whole organism of which [the mushroom] is merely a component may simply be impossible. Fungi also lack the comprehensible syntax of plants, the orderly and visible chronology of seed and vegetative growth, flower, fruit, and seed again. The fungi surely have a syntax of their own, but we don't know all its rules, especially the ones that govern the creation of a mushroom, which can take three years or thirty, depending. On what? We don't really know. ...

"Fungi, lacking chlorophyll, differ from plants in that they can't manufacture food energy from the sun. Like animals, they feed on organic matter made by plants, or by plant eaters. Most of the fungi we eat obtain their energy by one of two means: saprophytically, by decomposing dead vegetable matter, and mycorrhizally [like chanterelles and morels], by associating with the roots of living plants. Among the saprophytes, many of which can be cultivated by inoculating a suitable mass of dead organic matter (logs, manure, grain) with their spores, are the common white button mushrooms, shiitakes, cremini, Portobellos, and oyster mushrooms. Most of the choicest wild mushrooms are impossible to cultivate, or nearly so, since they need living and often very old trees in order to grow, and can take several decades to fruit. The mycelium can grow more or less indefinitely, in some cases for centuries, without necessarily fruiting. A single fungus recently found in Michigan covers an area of forty acres underground and is thought to be a few centuries old. So inoculating old oaks or pines is no guarantee of harvesting future mushrooms, at least not on a human time scale. Presumably, these fungi live and die on an arboreal time scale.

"Mycorrhizal fungi have coevolved with trees, with whom they've worked out a mutually beneficial relationship in which they trade the products of their very different metabolisms. If the special genius of plants is photosynthesis, the ability of chlorophyll to transform sunlight and water and soil minerals into carbohydrates, the special genius of fungi is the ability to break down organic molecules and minerals into simple molecules and atoms through the action of their powerful enzymes. The hyphae surround or penetrate the plant's roots, providing them with a steady diet of elements in exchange for a drop of simple sugars that the plant synthesizes in its leaves. The network of hyphae vastly extends the effective reach and surface area of a plant's root system, and while trees can survive without their fungal associates, they seldom thrive. It is thought that the fungi may also protect their plant hosts from bacterial and fungal diseases.

"The talent of fungi for decomposing and recycling organic matter is what makes them indispensable, not only to trees but to all life on earth."

delanceyplace.com 12/26/11 - the new world and the new food

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - Columbus's discovery of America brought new foods - including tomatoes, potatoes, corn, squash, and sugar - that transformed the European diet:

"Before Columbus, the diet of Europeans had remained basically unchanged for tens of thousands of years, based mainly on oats, barley, and wheat. Within a quarter century of his first voyage, the European diet became richer, more varied, and more nutritious. As Roger Schlesinger wrote in his book, In the Wake of Columbus: 'As far as dietary habits are concerned, no other series of events in all world history brought as much significant change as did [the discovery of the Americas]. 'The list of foods that made their way into Europe is extensive and includes maize, squash, pumpkin, avocado, papaya, cassava, vanilla, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes (yams), strawberries, and beans of almost every variety.

"The potato was one of the first American foods to be transported to Europe. Valued by the conquistadors, they made it a key item in the diet of their sailors. The potato then spread to England and Scotland, and to Ireland where it became the staple of the Irish diet.

"It was also the Spanish who discovered the tomato, first distributing it throughout their Caribbean possessions and then bringing it to Europe. In both Italy and Great Britain, the tomato was first thought to be poisonous, and it was not until the 1700s that the fruit became widely eaten. As was the case with sweet potatoes, which were regarded by some Europeans as having aphrodisiac-like qualities, the tomato was also viewed in some circles as having medicinal value. ... Actually, some of these claims may not have been as farfetched as they seem, since many Old World ailments were caused by the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. ...

"Tapioca, made from cassava root, eventually became a European delicacy, as did a drink made from the cocoa plant. By the time that Hernan Cortes and his men witnessed Aztecs drinking chocolatl, South and Central American natives had been consuming the beverage for hundreds of years. ...

"As diet-transforming as all these newly introduced foods became, sugar, perhaps, had the greatest impact of all. As ever-increasing amounts of sugar were transported from New World plantations to Europe, the types of foods that were eaten, and just as significantly, the ways in which they were cooked, were changed forever. Before the early 1500s, sugar was sold in European apothecary shops where, because of its scarcity, only the rich could afford it. But as sugar-laden ships arrived in Old World ports, prices tumbled and sugar became an important foodstuff for the masses. At the time, honey was both expensive and in short supply, but even if that had not been the case, most people found sugar to be a much more desirable sweetener. As a result, tea and coffee drinking gained a popularity that would never diminish.

"Even more important, the availability of sugar led to the proliferation of confections and jams that soon graced tables throughout Europe. ...

"Sugar's impact on the European diet went way beyond jams and confections and the sweetening of tea, coffee, and other beverages. Such leftover foods as rice and bread could now be given new life and a whole new taste when sprinkled with sugar and reheated. Fruits and vegetables could be inexpensively preserved when immersed in a sugary syrup. Sugar's popularity also led to the introduction of a host of new cooking utensils and accoutrements, including new types of saucepans, pie plates, cookie molds, sugar pots, sugar spoons, and tongs."

delanceyplace.com 12/23/11 - a christmas memory

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - seven-year-old Truman Capote, abandoned by his divorced parents, is taken in by depression-poor cousins in the rural South. One of these cousins, a distant, elderly cousin, becomes his closest friend and only refuge - but she is only in his life for two more short years. As Christmas approaches, they make fruitcakes as presents for people they barely know:

"Imagine a morning in late November. A coming-of-winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.

"A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. 'Oh my,' she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, 'it's fruitcake weather!'

"The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together—well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other's best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880's, when she was still a child. She is still a child. ...

"The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done. Thirty-one cakes, dampened with whiskey, bask on window sills and shelves.

"Who are they for?

"Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share are intended for persons we've met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who've struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six o'clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud whoosh. Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch (young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture, the only one we've ever had taken). Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes. Also, the scrapbooks we keep of thank-you's on White House stationery, time-to-time communications from California and Borneo, the knife grinder's penny post cards, make us feel connected to eventful worlds beyond the kitchen with its view of a sky that stops. ...

"[And then when Christmas morning finally comes, while the rest of the house still sleeps, a voice:] 'Buddy, are you awake?' It is my friend, calling from her room, which is next to mine; and an instant later she is sitting on my bed holding a candle. 'Well, I can't sleep a hoot,' she declares. 'My mind's jumping like a jack rabbit. Buddy, do you think Mrs. Roosevelt will serve our cake at dinner?' We huddle in the bed, and she squeezes my hand I-love-you."

delanceyplace.com 12/22/11 - saving babies

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:50:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the invention, and reinvention, of incubators for newborns:

"Sometime in the late 1870s, a Parisian obstetrician named Stephane Tarnier took a day off from his work at Maternite de Paris, the lying-in hospital for the city's poor women, and paid a visit to the nearby Paris Zoo. Wandering past the elephants and reptiles and classical gardens of the zoo's home inside the Jardin des Plantes, Tarnier stumbled across an exhibit of chicken incubators. Seeing the hatchlings totter about in the incubator's warm enclosure triggered an association in his head, and before long he had hired Odile Martin, the zoo's poultry raiser, to construct a device that would perform a similar function for human newborns. By modern standards, infant mortality was staggeringly high in the late nineteenth century, even in a city as sophisticated as Paris. One in five babies died before learning to crawl, and the odds were far worse for premature babies born with low birth weights. Tarnier knew that temperature regulation was critical for keeping these infants alive, and he knew that the French medical establishment had a deep-seated obsession with statistics. And so as soon as his newborn incubator had been installed at Maternite, the fragile infants warmed by hot water bottles below the wooden boxes, Tarnier embarked on a quick study of five hundred babies. The results shocked the Parisian medical establishment: while 66 percent of low-weight babies died within weeks of birth, only 38 percent died if they were housed in Tarnier's incubating box. You could effectively halve the mortality rate for premature babies simply by treating them like hatchlings in a zoo. ...

"Modern incubators, supplemented with high-oxygen therapy and other advances, became standard equipment in all American hospitals after the end of World War II, triggering a spectacular 75 percent decline in infant mortality rates between 1950 and 1998. ...

"In the developing world, however, the infant mortality story remains bleak. Whereas infant deaths are below ten per thousand births throughout Europe and the United States, over a hundred infants die per thousand in countries like Liberia and Ethiopia, many of them premature babies that would have survived with access to incubators. But modern incubators are complex, expensive things. A standard incubator in an American hospital might cost more than $40,000. But the expense is arguably the smaller hurdle to overcome. Complex equipment breaks, and when it breaks you need the technical expertise to fix it, and you need replacement parts. In the year that followed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Indonesian city of Meulaboh received eight incubators from a range of international relief organizations. By late 2008, when an MIT professor named Timothy Prestero visited the hospital, all eight were out of order, the victims of power surges and tropical humidity, along with the hospital staff's inability to read the English repair manual. ...

"Prestero and his team decided to build an incubator out of parts that were already abundant in the developing world. The idea had originated with a Boston doctor named Jonathan Rosen, who had observed that even the smaller towns of the developing world seemed to be able to keep automobiles in working order. The towns might have lacked air conditioning and laptops and cable television, but they managed to keep their Toyota 4Runners on the road. So Rosen approached Prestero with an idea: What if you made an incubator out of automobile parts?

"Three years after Rosen suggested the idea, the team introduced a prototype device called the NeoNurture. From the outside, it looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts were automotive. Sealed-beam headlights supplied the crucial warmth; dashboard fans provided filtered air circulation; door chimes sounded alarms. You could power the device via an adapted cigarette lighter, or a standard-issue motorcycle battery. Building the NeoNurture out of car parts was doubly efficient, because it tapped both the local supply of parts themselves and the local knowledge of automobile repair. These were both abundant resources in the developing world context, as Rosen liked to say. You didn't have to be a trained medical technician to fix the NeoNurture; you didn't even have to read the manual. You just needed to know how to replace a broken headlight."

delanceyplace.com 12/21/11 - the ghost of christmas yet to come

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - having been visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, Ebenezer Scrooge is led to a bed by a third Ghost. Scrooge, too afraid to look upon the face of that dead man lying in his bed, and having seen that the crippled Tiny Tim is now also dead (he who was so very light to carry), is now led by that Spirit to a graveyard to learn the identity of that dead man:

Scrooge joined the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come once again, and wondering why and whither he had gone, accompanied it until they reached an iron gate. He paused to look round before entering.

A churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man whose name he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place!

The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.

"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?"

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me."

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.

"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon his knees.

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"

The finger still was there.

"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life."

The kind hand trembled.

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.

Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate aye reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.

delanceyplace.com 12/20/11 - the turmoil of steve mcqueen

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Steve McQueen, once the highest-paid actor in the world, whose talents seared the screen in such movies as Bullitt, The Great Escape, The Sand Pebbles, The Magnificent Seven, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Getaway, Papillon, and The Towering Inferno:

"Terrence Steven McQueen was the product of a one-night stand that stretched into a year and six months of misery between Terrence William McQueen, a handsome, philandering stunt pilot for a traveling circus, and Jullian Crawford, a teenage alcoholic prostitute. Terrence William left Jullian and Steven for good six months after the boy was born. Unable to cope with single motherhood, Jullian soon abandoned Steven. As casually as she changed clothes (or took them off), Jullian passed him off to her uncle, the wealthy but emotionally distant Claude Thomson.

"These early traumatic events helped shape the fragile, needy psyche that for the rest of Steve McQueen's life would bubble just beneath the deceptively smooth surface of his very good-looking exterior. Physically beautiful but emotionally insecure, this shy and withdrawn little boy would grow up to become an international movie superstar. He would be loved by millions from afar, but unable to handle intimate commitment and often lash out at those women who tried to love him in real life.

"His emotional insecurity left him extremely sensitive and wary, a combination that would aid him enormously in his early days as an actor, and lead to his powerful attraction to and essential distrust of females - a pattern that began in childhood with his mother and continued into adult life with the three women he made his wives. Marriage to Steve meant swimming in a pool of emotional turmoil. The promise of commitment tempted him, but the fear of abandonment compelled him to run away. He was a lover and a fighter whose emotions were always stoked to the peak of their heat.

"Film directors favor those actors who can take their considerable inner turmoil and use it to infuse the characters they play in the movies with a heightened and compelling sense of drama. It is what is called talent in Hollywood, and those who have it, despite the high personal price they pay, are highly coveted.

"Steve McQueen had it. His special, unique talent was his ability to balance his inner heat (his emotional rage, his distrust of older authority figures, and his defiance of them) and his cautious, careful, catlike wariness that so beautifully translated to the screen as the ultimate in cool."

delanceyplace.com 12/19/11 - if I save you, I owe you

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:28:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in our society, we assume that if someone saves another person's life, then the person saved owes the person who saved them. However, in some societies, the opposite is true, the person who is saved is owed by the person who saved them. In fact, in some societies, if someone saves another's life, he is considered responsible for taking care of that person forever. Perhaps that is the deeper truth:

"Nineteenth-century ... missionaries working in certain parts of Africa would often be astounded by the reactions they would receive when they administered medicines. Here's a typical example, from a British missionary in Congo:

"A day or two after we reached Vana we found one of the natives very ill with pneumonia. Comber treated him and kept him alive on strong fowl soup; a great deal of careful nursing and attention was visited on him, for his house was beside the camp. When we were ready to go on our way again, the man was well. To our astonishment he came and asked us for a present, and was as astonished and disgusted as he had made us to be, when we declined giving it. We suggested that it was his place to bring us a present and to show some gratitude. He said to us, 'Well indeed! You white men have no shame!'

"In the early decades of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in an attempt to prove that 'natives' operated with an entirely different form of logic, compiled a list of similar stories: for instance, of a man saved from drowning who proceeded to ask his rescuer to give him some nice clothes to wear, or another who, on being nursed back to health after having been savaged by a tiger, demanded a knife. One French missionary working in Central Africa insisted that such things happened to him on a regular basis:

"You save a person's life, and you must expect to receive a visit from him before long; you are now under an obligation to him, and you will not get rid of him except by giving him presents.

"Now, certainly, there is almost always felt to be something extraordinary about saving a life. Anything surrounding birth and death almost cannot help but partake of the infinite, and, therefore, throw all everyday means of moral calculation askew. This is probably why stories like this had become something of a cliche in America when I was growing up. I remember as a child several times being told that among the Inuit (or sometimes it was among Buddhists, or Chinese, but curiously, never Africans) - that if one saves someone else's life, one is considered responsible for taking care of that person forever. It defies our sense of reciprocity. But somehow, it also makes a weird kind of sense."

delanceyplace.com 12/16/11 - wyatt earp and the american west

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman most famous for the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Arizona, grew up in the mid-1800s in places as diverse as Illinois, Missouri and California. His father, like so many others, unsuccessfully sought fortune and esteem in the new American West. As a young man, Wyatt alternately served as a lawman and ran afoul of the law for crimes such as theft and working in a bordello:

"On September 7, 1872, a police boat on the Illinois River intercepted a vessel that served as a floating casino and bordello. The Peoria Daily National Democrat reported on the seven men and six women taken into custody:

"Some of the women are said to be good looking, but all appear to be terribly depraved. John Walton, the skipper of the boat, and Wyatt Earp, the Peoria bummer, were each fined $43.15. . . . Sarah Earp, alias Sally Heckell, calls herself the wife of Wyatt.

"Sally Heckell was probably the teen-aged daughter of bordello operator Jane Haspel - the last names are similar, and frontier newspapers were notoriously inaccurate in their identifications. Jane had a child named Sarah, and probably brought the girl into the family business. In the summer and fall of 1872, Wyatt Earp was twenty-three and certainly not ready to give up women despite the loss of his [first] wife a year earlier. Upper-class men, even on the frontier, would not have stooped to any kind of an open relationship with a young prostitute, but Wyatt wasn't in any sense upper-class. Women in the West were scarce. You took what you could get, and since Wyatt was working in brothels it was natural that his possible selections were mostly limited to the women he met there. ...

"Wyatt had been in Peoria long enough to develop a bad reputation. Being described as a 'bummer' in the local press had considerable negative connotations. Bummers were worse than tramps; they were men of poor character who were also chronic lawbreakers. Communities were well rid of them when they moved on. Wyatt did, but it's important to place his problems in Peoria, Van Buren, and Lamar in perspective. Wyatt broke jail in Van Buren and fled from theft charges in Lamar. In Peoria, he not only worked in whorehouses, he kept coming back to the job after being arrested, fined, and even serving a short jail term. But many men on the frontier had youthful brushes with the law. Skimming small sums of public money was almost expected of lawmen and tax collectors in small Western communities. It was an unwritten perk. Horse theft was a serious crime, but rarely to the 'string 'em up' extent popularized in dime novels. Though most frontier men didn't work in bordellos, many of them at least visited. One of the attractions of the West was that it was possible to make mistakes, and, in moving on, move beyond them.

"[Three years later in Wichita, Kansas, marshal Mike Meagher hired Wyatt as a deputy]. Meagher probably didn't know about Wyatt's recent problems with the law in Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois, but if he did he would not have cared. Few frontier lawmen had clean records; the idea was that men who'd broken laws themselves would understand best how to prevent others from doing the same. Wyatt's salary was $60 a month, plus another dollar or two for each arrest he made. That sounds more lucrative than it really was. Wichita deputies only arrested Texas drovers as a last resort. The drovers couldn't spend their money from a cell.

"New deputy Earp spent most of his time performing menial tasks. He functioned as the Wichita Animal Control Department, collecting dead animals from city streets. Deputy Earp enforced building codes, checking chimneys and repairing wooden slat sidewalks. He collected licensing fees, disguised as fines to gratify the town's religious element, from saloonkeepers and whorehouse madams like his sister-in-law Bessie. Despite Wyatt later telling John Flood that he was 'in charge of the mounted police in Wichita' - Wichita had no mounted police, unless the marshal or a deputy happened to be on horseback - he was a flunky. But he was a flunky with a badge, and that was a start. And, soon, Wyatt had his own reputation around town. When Texans had to be subdued but not arrested, he cooled them down with whacks on the head with the barrel of his gun. 'Buffaloing' was a routine tactic for frontier lawmen, and Wyatt excelled."

delanceyplace.com 12/15/11 - kids are cruel

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:46:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - The Mickey Mouse Club television show was cancelled in 1958 after three seasons, and almost all the Mouseketeers, who were pre-teens and teenagers, found themselves out of work and trying to reenter normal life. Very few received help from Disney or were able to sustain careers in the entertainment world, and most went on to lives filled with disappointment. Even returning to their former schools proved daunting:

"The clash between the [ex-]Mouseketeers' former selves still on television in reruns, and the teenagers careening toward adulthood who they now were, highlighted the larger conflict that would mar their lives for years to come: the idyllic '50s sensibility their screen images represented versus the hipper grown-ups they were trying to become. 'After a while it was a part of my life that I wanted over, and it just wouldn't die,' Dennis Day said in an interview. 'There were all those reruns, and people kept recognizing me.'

"This conflict first played itself out in the halls of the schools to which the Mouse- keteers were hoping to return quietly and without incident. Kids in Karen Pendleton's seventh-grade class would ask her for her autograph, but when the guileless middle-schooler would give it to them, they'd tear it up in front of her. 'What a time to go back to school,' she says. 'There were so many kids who were mean to me. They'd gather around me at lunchtime, and the vice principal would have to come and get me out. It did no wonders for my self-esteem, which was already low anyway.' Her classmates would say things like, 'Wiggle your ears and I'll give you some cheese.' Some boys threw a worm at her. All she could do was wait for the novelty of torturing a former Mouseketeer to wear off, which would take longer than she'd hoped: 'Even through high school and a couple of times in college, people would still say things to me. And dating was hard. It was hard to do, to be attached to a Mouse.'

"Don Agrati, a tiny thirteen-year-old, acquired the nickname 'Mouse' the second he returned to public school and suffered from the same unoriginal - though still hurtful - teasing methods his first love, Karen, was also enduring. Kids would sing 'The Mickey Mouse Club March' whenever he entered the cafeteria. 'I was in fights every day and I was just miserable,' he recalls. 'So my parents took me out of the school. They said, 'You know what, you need to start over again. And the same thing's going to happen. You have to respond, react differently this time.' The same thing, the exact same thing, happened the first day I was at the cafeteria in the new school. I walked in, they started singing The Mickey Mouse Club song. But this time I just joined in. And it worked. That was it. I just needed to do that once and it was like they saw that I was fun and it was over.'

"Tommy Cole had to switch schools too because of his ex-Mouseketeer status. His hometown school wasn't forgiving of the classwork he'd missed while on The Mickey Mouse Club, even though he'd been attending to his studies in the studio-lot trailers as required by law. He tried to return to John Muir High School in Pasadena, but he couldn't catch a break. 'John Muir had no idea what a show kid was, none whatsoever,' he recalls. 'They did not give me a bit of slack on anything. They gave me a real hard time, and my parents finally pulled me out of there. I finished up my high school at Hollywood Professional School because they understand showbiz there."

delanceyplace.com 12/14/11 - american music becomes a personal kind of speech

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Aaron Copland, the composer who first followed the influences of jazz and abstract music, but ultimately became the most powerful voice in American music by "composing his music in the simplest possible terms" and turning out such enduring masterpieces as Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man:

"The composer who best represented the United States in the public and professional eye [in the mid-20th century] was Aaron Copland, born in Brooklyn on November 14, 1900. Copland made the break that took American music away from the faded provincialism of Edward MacDowell into a powerful, modern, very personal kind of speech. He also helped break the stranglehold of the German domination on American music. As a young pianist and aspiring composer, he first studied with Rubin Goldmark, but abruptly shifted and went to Paris in 1921. ...

"Copland was in Paris at a good time, and was intellectually stimulated. Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, Les Six [a group of Montparnasse composers reacting against Wagner], the Ballets Russes - all had their headquarters there. Picasso, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and her circle, Joyce, and the other heroes of the Left Bank made Paris in the 1920s the most exciting city in the world. Copland, brash, breezy and confident, full of ideas about music, interested in American jazz, started turning out a kind of music that was his own. It was a music that reflected the new age. Copland was not the only American to work in an avant-garde style, ... [but he] was the one who had the brains, determination, and skill to arrive at his goal.

"At first he was influenced by Stravinsky and Les Six, and composed polyrhythmic music that played with jazz elements. After 1927, Copland dropped jazz. 'With the Piano Concerto I felt I had done all I could with the idiom, considering its limited emotional scope. True, it was an easy way to be American in musical terms, but all American music could not possibly be confined to two dominant jazz models: the 'blues' and the snappy number.' Many other composers of the period had come to the same conclusion. During the 1920s some of the international stars, including Stravinsky, had a brief fling with jazz, but nothing much came of it.

"After the Piano Concerto, Copland turned to a completely different form of expression, one that stimulated every young American composer. With the Piano Variations (1930), the Short Symphony (1933, later reduced to a Sextet), and Statements for Orchestra (1935), Copland became the leader of the new American school.

"These new products from Copland's pen were stripped-down scores, dissonant, percussive, powerful, abstract. ... 'They are difficult to perform, and difficult for an audience to comprehend,' Copland said of this music. The public did not respond; it seldom does to abstract music - that is, music in which the rigorous development of an idea occupies more importance than melody (in the traditional sense of the word). These were the days when everybody was desperately anxious to be 'modern,' and Copland was most modern of all the Americans.

"Suddenly Copland changed his style once again. He shifted from abstractionism to a more popular idiom. Copland felt that the new music could be dangerous in that it might end up completely alienating the public. In The New Music he pointed out that: ...

"An entirely new public for music had grown up around the radio and the phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn't say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.

"Thus came into being the music by which Copland is best known and best loved. With The Second Hurricane (1935), El Salon Mexico (1936), and above all with his three 'American' ballets - Billy the Kid (1938) for Eugene Loring, Rodeo (1940) for Agnes de Mille, and Appalachian Spring (1944) for Martha Graham - he moved out of a small circle into a position as not only the most respected American composer but also the most popular, by far."

delanceyplace.com 12/13/11 - boston bans beethoven

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:09:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - once America entered the First World War in 1917, anti-German passions began to rage against even those Germans living in America. As with the Irish, Italians and Chinese before, and Mexicans, Arabs and many other ethnic groups since, vilifying an ethnic group has long been part of our political fabric. In this case, for those who had been laboring to pass a prohibition amendment to the constitution, this anti-German sentiment could be used to sway votes since most of America's brewers were German. And, as Purley Baker, president of the powerful Anti-Saloon League put it, Germans were "a race of people who eat like gluttons and drink like swine":

"The [First World] War's clinching contribution to the 'dry' cause arrived in February 1918, as the Eighteenth Amendment was beginning its journey through the state legislatures. 'We have German enemies across the water,' a dry politician named John Strange told the Milwaukee Journal that month. 'We have German enemies in this country too. And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller.' ... When the fear was attached to all things German, it proceeded to breed like an out-of-control virus.

"Soon Red Cross leaders were claiming that German-Americans had penetrated their organization and were putting ground glass in bandages meant for U.S. troops. Addressing the members of the Union League Club in New York, Elihu Root - former secretary of state, former secretary of war, Nobel Peace Prize winner, recently retired U.S. senator - said,'There are men walking about the streets of this city who ought to be taken out at sunrise and shot for treason.' In his infamous 'Babel Proclamation,' Governor William L. Harding of Iowa declared speaking German in public or on the telephone unlawful. German books were burned in Wisconsin, playing Beethoven in public was banned in Boston, and throughout the country foodstuffs and street names of German origin were denatured by benign Anglo-Saxonisms. Nearly ninety years before french fries became freedom fries during the Iraq War, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage and, in an odd homage to the president, Cincinnati's Berlin Street became Woodrow Street. 'Cotton Tom' Heflin of Alabama, who could always be counted on to transcend the limits of ordinary, everyday bias, said, 'We must execute the Huns within our gates. The firing squad is the only solution for these perverts and renegades.'

"The most horrifying single example of anti-German hysteria was described by historian David M. Kennedy in Over Here, his history of the home front during World War I:

"Near St. Louis in April 1918, a mob seized Robert Prager, a young man whose only discernible offense was to have been born in Germany. He had, in fact, tried to enlist in the American Navy but had been rejected for medical reasons. Stripped, bound with an American flag, dragged barefoot and stumbling through the streets, Prager was eventually lynched to the lusty cheers of five hundred patriots. A trial of the mob's leaders followed, in which the defendants wore red, white, and blue ribbons to court, and the defense counsel called their deed 'patriotic murder.' The jury took twenty-five minutes to return a verdict of not guilty."

Notable Books We Read in 2011

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Here are our regular baker's dozen of notable books we read during this year - whether they were published in 2011 or not! They are presented below - but not in order of preference or importance.

The first two books are a glimpse into our future:

The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil (2005)

This book will change how you think about the future, and is almost as fresh today as it was when written. Ray Kurzweil, a relentless optimist and notably successful entrepreneur, is a polymath who exhaustively catalogues the best new research and development in virtually every area - including health and medicine. Even if you don't read the entire book, and even if you are skeptical of what he concludes, simply reading the first two chapters will radically impact your views.

Final Jeopardy by Stephen Baker (2011)

This is the story of the IBM team that built the computer - famously named Watson - that beat the best-of-the-best Jeopardy champions. The book is a gripping read even though we know the outcome, but more in fundamentally, it gives us an inkling of how artificial intelligence works and how profoundly it will change our lives going forward.

The next few books are from the realm of entertainment:

Acting in Film by Michael Caine (1990)

This pearl of a book is a quick read, yet will reward any true movie buff. Caine, of course, is one of the best and most durable actors in film, and his instruction and insights will deepen your understanding of acting, movie-making, and human nature - and add to your viewing pleasure.

Judy Garland: The Other Side of the Rainbow by Michael Freedland (2010)

Once upon a time, Americans lived in picket-fenced small towns, any problem could be solved if we just put on a backyard musical, and bluebirds flew over the rainbow. Judy Garland's small town Minnesota truth, however, was a mixture of the dark, shameful secrets of her father and the iron will of her obsessive mother - and this book about the torments that elevated and destroyed her. Garland is the archetype of the American tragedy - she reached a level of superstardom rarely seen since, and yet died gaunt and broken at the age of forty-seven. Would I betray a confidence if I said that Garland was my mother's favorite - and thus has always also been mine too?

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (2011)

Bill Bryson is a wonder. From science to Shakespeare, the variety and scope of his books is astounding, and there has not been a book he has written that I wouldn't recommend. At Home takes the reader from ancient homes traced in ruins to countryside estates and London's Crystal Palace - and we learn not only the reasons for the rooms and homes we have today - but about private lives, wealth, poverty, family, deceit, sex and countless other things along the way.

Next comes a book about social policy:

Don't Shoot by David M. Kennedy (2011)

The surging murder rate in poor black neighborhoods contrasts sharply with the decline in murder rates nationwide. Each increase brings a rush of pundits - with conservatives calling for tougher police tactics and jail sentences, and liberals calling for greater investments in education and welfare. Kennedy, with twenty-five years of direct experience on the subject, moves past both liberal and conservative prescriptions to solutions that are less expensive, more civilized, faster, and demonstrably more effective. He starts from the belief that all communities, regardless of how broken, want peace and safety, that people are good and decent - and that the trouble comes largely from a tiny number of a broken community's inhabitants who can readily be identified and dealt with. Don't Shoot is the most persuasive and hopeful book we have read on crime in years.

With the continuing economic crisis, we spent a good part of the year delving into books on economics. Here are three of the most notable:

The Big Short by Michael Lewis (2010)

If you believe that markets are rational, and that the people leading our largest financial institutions and regulatory bodies are competent, this book might shake your confidence. If you instead believe that there is big money to be made because markets are irrational and regulators and bankers are prone to merely follow the crowd, this book will inspire you and leave you scouring the landscape for the market's next big blunder. Michael Lewis is, of course, a master storyteller - and the blindness of the people-in-charge will once again astound you. But the real story of this book is the extraordinary difficulty it takes to go against the crowd - the enormous energy, persistence and fortitude required.

The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics by Richard C. Koo (2009)

I am an economic conservative and have great respect for Ronald Reagan and the theories of Milton Friedman (that bête noire of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine) - so you might find my inclusion of a book by a Keynesian economist unusual. I include it because my sense is that no economic camp has a full hold on the truth, and anyone serious about understanding the Great Depression, Japan's lost decade, and our current fiscal calamity should explore the better articulations of each major economic theory. And that is what this is - a very clear and well-argued book that attempts a new explanation of the Great Depression, the so-called "Holy Grail" of economic theory. Koo does that by introducing an important new idea to Keynesian economics - the balance sheet recession - which itself further explains why cutting rates to zero and flooding the market with liquidity has not resulted in the expected rebound from today's crisis.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang (2011)

Capitalism is the most successful economic system yet devised and I am an ardent capitalist - yet I'm not blind to the excesses and recurring blunders that occur within largely capitalist economies. It is therefore incumbent upon those of us who would defend capitalism to thoughtfully examine the arguments of those not in our camp. To that end, I found Chang's book clearly written and highly useful, revealing and thought-provoking. For example, Western economies have been built on the limited liability corporation first widely used by the Dutch centuries ago (know then as a joint stock company). It was one of civilization's most consequential inventions - but the excesses that often result because of that limited liability were understood clearly from the very beginning.

And, of course, we have included a few books on American History. When we look for books on American history, it is often with the purpose of filling in some areas of that history that have been neglected - and so it is with this year's books on Prohibition, the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese Wars, the French and Indian and Mexican-American Wars, and the presidency of James Polk. I am an ardent patriot - I absolutely love my country and revel in its glories. But I find it much more interesting - and frankly much more helpful in understanding policy choices today - to look past the hagiographies usually written on American history to the back rooms and dark corners where that history so often truly happened:

Last Call by Daniel Okrent (2010)

Last Call is a primer on how American politics really works, and is perhaps the most relevant and revealing book on government I have ever read. Today's political landscape is dominated by single or narrow issue special interest groups - anti-abortion groups, oil interests, the green movement and more. But as with the abolition, suffrage, and temperance movements of our past (to name just a few) - it has always been so. Prohibition was a law eighty years in the making, and the religiously-based political machine that made it happen was formidable - finding common cause with other special interest groups as diverse as the women's suffrage movement and the Ku Klux Klan to gain passage.

Polk by Walter R. Borneman (2008)

Here are two good cocktail party questions for you - especially if you're a history geek like me. First, under which president did America's greatest geographic expansion occur? Second, which U.S. president made a campaign promise not to seek a second term? In both cases, the answer is James Polk of Tennessee, heir to the legacy of Andrew Jackson. During his presidency, all of the Southwest including California, and all of the Northwest including Washington state became part of our country. (And Texas entered as a state during his presidency too.) Polk's story will give you a flavor of life at the rough western edge of America in its earliest years. This book is an easy read that will deepen your understanding of our country.

The Dominion of War by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton (2005)

Both the American Revolution and the American Civil War started roughly twelve years after the acquisition of vast amounts of new land through war. The American Revolution took place just a few years after England had secured possession of the vast lands immediately west of the colonies in the French and Indian War. The Civil War started just a few years after America took possession of more vast lands - including modern day New Mexico, Arizona, and California - as part of the treaty concluding the Mexican American War. Anderson and Cayton argue that the Revolutionary and Civil Wars happened in large part because of the acquisition of those lands. Whether you agree or disagree with the theories of this book, it is an important articulation of America's involvement in war that will leave you with a much more comprehensive view.

The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley (2009)

Bradley is best known for Flags of our Fathers, and this adds to his well regarded output. What I don't like about this book is how often Bradley's rhetoric slips from a historical to a righteous tone - because the book would have been more powerful it. What I do like about it is how well it covers an important part of our history rarely covered elsewhere, and how deftly he counters the normally worshipful treatment of Theodore Roosevelt. Immensely readable, with unforgettable characters, and we forgive any book that gives us a full dose of that very first White House social superstar - Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

We are truly grateful for your interest in delanceyplace.com!!

delanceyplace.com 12/12/11 - will you still love me tomorrow?

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - between 1959 and 1964, the most prolific incubator for new teenage music in America was the Brill Building in New York City, which launched the careers of such legendary songwriters (and later performers) as Carole King, Neil Diamond and Bobby Darin:

"The Brill Building, located at 1619 Broadway in the heart of New York's music district, is in outward ap-pearance indistinguishable from a thousand other old office buildings in midtown Manhattan. Yet since the late Fifties, its name has been synonymous with an approach to rock songwriting that has changed the course of the music. The fame of the Brill Building is largely due to Aldon Music, a music publishing firm actually located across the street. ...

"Rock & roll had been growing steadily in popularity for several years, and its audience's tastes were becoming possible to define, if not always to predict; the established music industry, at first baffled by rock & roll, was now searching for means to manipulate it, to make it fit into the old rules they understood. No larger gap could be imagined than that between the sophisticated cocktail music of Tin Pan Alley and the rude street noise of rock & roll, yet it was this very gap that [Aldon founders] Al Nevins and Don Kirshner set out to bridge. Initially, they were merely responding to the overwhelming demand for songs by the thousands of young groups and singers now clogging the stu¬dios. Most of these performers were recording either old standards or thoroughly inadequate original material—for it was very rare in those days for rock & roll artists to write decent material of their own. ...

"Kirshner's goal was to supply songs for this new market, songs that would meet the highest standards of professionalism while still appealing to a teenage audience. He and Nevins gathered together the best of New York's young writers, some now forgotten (Jack Keller, Gary Sherman, Kenny Karen, Toni Wine, Larry Kolber), others destined for lasting popularity. Among Aldon's first group of then-un¬knowns were Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Bobby Darin, Neil Diamond, Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka. Aldon's clients were chiefly the large record labels like Columbia, Atlantic, RCA and ABC, which required songs of high quality in great quantity. On the whole, it was Aldon's success in setting a new standard of quality in rock songwriting that ensured the firm's preeminence. ... Discounting small pockets of creativity in New Orleans and Detroit, the Brill Building accounted for much of the best rock popular between 1959 and 1964. ...

"The most typical and in many respects the premier performer of the Aldon stable was Carole King, raised in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as Sedaka and Greenfield. She made a few solo records in the late Fifties, including an answer to Sedaka's 'Oh! Carol.' But it was in partnership with Gerry Goffin, under the tutelage of Nevins and Kirshner, that she emerged as a composer—a career so successful that her own singing was pushed into the background for more than a decade. Few of her fans are aware of the number of hits she was responsible for: In the space of five years, more than a hundred substantial singles, and at least a hundred more that didn't quite make it. The Goffin-King team was probably the most prolific and popular of its era.

"King composed melodies as Sedaka did: under constant pressure to turn out a constant stream of hits. But with the addition of Goffin's lyrics. King evolved a uniquely individual style. Goffin dealt with teenage problems and situations in a mature and emotionally believable manner. His lyrics were literate without being as literary as Greenfield's. Consider 'Up on the Roof,' in every way a remark¬able pop song for 1962 When this old world starts getting me down And people are just too much for me to take I climb way up to the top of the stairs And all my cares just drift right into space . .

When this old world starts getting me down
And people are just too much for me to take
I climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space . .

"From the internal rhyme of 'stairs' and 'cares' to the image of ascending from the street to the stars by way of an apartment staircase, it's first-rate, sophisticated writing, unmarred by Greenfield's overwrought virtuosity. Goffin was able to combine fantasy and realism successfully on 'Halfway to Paradise,' the powerful 'Hey, Girl,' and Goffin and King's all-time classic, 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow,' their first hit to-gether and an astonishingly honest (for 1960) re¬statement of the old 'will you still respect me in the morning' theme."

delanceyplace.com 12/9/11 - the magic of ahmet ertegun and duke ellington

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Ahmet Ertegun was the legendary founder and president of Atlantic Records who signed Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Rolling Stones, and countless others. He was the ten-year-old son of the Turkish ambassador to Britain when he was first confronted with the overwhelming energy and power of of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. For him it was "real jazz ... not this bullshit thing we hear on a record player":

"Ahmet was ten years old when Edward Kennedy 'Duke' Ellington, 'the King of Jazz,' came to London for the first time on June 12, 1933, to perform with 'His Famous Orchestra' at the London Palladium. The grandson of a former slave, Ellington was then thirty-four years old. Raised in Washington, D.C., he had begun taking piano lessons when he was seven years old, written his first composition at the age of fourteen, and begun his career as a professional musician four years later.

"Duke Ellington's two-week engagement at the Palladium was a cultural event of major proportions, changing not only how he performed but also the way in which his music was perceived. ... On Ellington's opening night in the Palladium, the curtain opened to reveal an expansive stage decorated with three huge cardboard cutouts of cartoonlike black musicians, all of which would now be considered racist. In a pearl gray suit, white shirt, and tie, the impossibly elegant and regal-looking Duke sat behind a concert grand piano. ...

"The 'scores of smartly dressed young English people' in the expensive seats, among them the Duke of Kent, the third son of King George V, stomped their feet, shouted, whistled, and applauded in approval as did the 'hundreds in the hinterlands of the Palladium.' After the show, 'a small army of autograph seekers,' sixty women among them, 'besieged the Duke and his musicians' outside the stage door.

"In what one English jazz scholar would later call 'a precursor to Beatlemania,' fans clung to Ellington's limousine as he was driven from the BBC extended the program for five minutes so Ellington could play 'Mood Indigo' in its entirety.

"For Ahmet, who was taken to the show by his brother, the evening was an ear-shattering, life-changing experience he would never forget. 'It was nothing like hearing the records,' Ahmet would later say. 'The engineers at the time were afraid that too much bass or too much drums would crack the grooves on the 78s so they recorded them very low. And when you heard these bands in person, it was explosive. This boom-boom-boom incredible rhythm. It went through your body. I went, 'Oh my God, this is jazz. This is not this bullshit thing we hear on a record player. This is real jazz.' ... The very loudness of the sound, the reverberation of the bass and drum in the theater frightened me, it was so powerful... I'd never heard music with that kind of strength ... For the first time, I saw these beautiful black men wearing shining white tuxedos and these brass instruments gleaming. It was an incredible sight.' "

delanceyplace.com 12/8/11 - why we fought the war of 1812

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - after the American Revolution, the British maintained their support of the Indians along the western border of the United States, limiting the ability of Americans to expand westward. The American push against this limitation was the cause of the War 1812, though some contemporary textbooks still miss this key point. And average Americans, to the extent they are aware of the war at all, generally repeat the reason offered by then President Madison's administration - namely that the cause was Britain forcing American seamen to serve on its ships:

"After the American Revolution, although Britain gave up, its Native American allies did not. Our insistence on treating the Indians as if we had defeated them led to the Ohio War of 1790-95 and later to the War of 1812. ...

"Most textbooks do state that conflict over land was the root cause of our Indian wars. [The widely used textbook] Pathways to the Present, for example, begins its discussion of the War of 1812 by telling how Tecumseh met with Gov. William Henry Harrison of Indiana Territory to complain about whites en- croaching upon Indian land. Other recent textbooks likewise emphasize conflict with the Indians, who were seen as backed by the British, as the key cause of this dispute. All along the boundary, from Vermont to the Georgia Piedmont, white Americans wanted to push the boundary of white settlement ever farther into Indian country.

"This is a significant change for the better [in the content of these textbooks]; earlier textbooks simply repeated the pretext offered by the Madison administration - Britain's refusal to show proper respect to American ships and seamen - even though it made no sense. After all, Britain's maritime laws caused no war until the frontier states sent Warhawks - senators and representatives who promised military action to expand the boundaries of the United States - to Congress in 1810. Whites along the frontier wanted the war, and along the frontier most of the war was fought, beginning in November 1811 when Harrison replied to Tecumseh's complaint by attacking the Shawnees and allied tribes at the Battle of Tippecanoe. The United States fought five of the seven major land battles of the War of 1812 primarily against Native Americans.

"All but two textbooks miss the key result of the war. Some authors actually cite the 'Star Spangled Banner' as the main outcome! Others claim that the war left 'a feeling of pride as a nation' or 'helped Americans to win European respect.' The textbook The American Adventure excels, pointing out, 'The American Indians were the only real losers in the war,' Triumph of the American Nation expresses the same sentiments, but euphemistically: 'After 1815 the American people began the exciting task of occupying the western lands.' All the other [widely-used] textbooks miss the key outcome: in return for our leaving Canada alone, Great Britain gave up its alliances with American Indian nations in what would become the United States. Without war materiel and other aid from European allies, future Indian wars were transformed from major international conflicts to domestic mopping-up operations. This result was central to the course of Indian-U.S. relations for the remainder of the century. Thus Indian wars after 1815, while they cost thousands of lives on both sides, would never again amount to a serious threat to the United States. Although Native Americans won many battles in subsequent wars, there was never the slightest doubt over who would win in the end. ...

"[There was not unanimity within the U.S. about expanding west. Some were already concerned that it might increase the influence of slaveholding states]. One reason the War of 1812 was so unpopular in New England was that New Englanders saw it as a naked attempt by slave owners to appropriate Indian land. ...

"Even terminology changed [as a result of the War of 1812]: until 1815 the word Americans had generally been used to refer to Native Americans; after 1815 it meant European Americans."

delanceyplace.com 12/7/11 - the justice system is broken

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in the past, as an outgrowth of America's democratic roots, an individual accused of a crime was most likely to face local law enforcement officials, a locally elected prosecutor, and a jury of local peers. In the view of Harvard Law Professor William Stuntz, this has structurally changed:

"In most countries, national governments or provincial governments enforce criminal law. [In the United States], local institutions - chiefly city police forces and county prosecutors' offices - do most of the enforcing, while locally selected juries judge those criminal defendants who take their cases to trial. Likewise, in most of the world prosecutors and judges are civil servants. Here, local prosecutors - the ones who try the large majority of cases - and trial judges (appellate judges, too) are, with few exceptions, chosen by voters of the counties in which they work. At least in theory, these features of the justice system give citizens in crime-ridden neighborhoods a good deal of power over criminal law enforcement in their neighborhoods.

"That power is less substantial than it once was, thanks to four changes that happened gradually throughout the twentieth century. First, crime grew more concentrated in cities, and especially in poor neighborhoods within those cities. Historically, crime was not an urban problem in the United States: cities' murder rates were no higher than the nation's. In the last sixty years, that has changed. Poor city neighborhoods are more dangerous than they once were, and wealthier urban and suburban neighborhoods are probably safer. Today, a large fraction - often a large majority - of the population of cities and metropolitan counties live in neighborhoods where crime is an abstraction, not a problem that defines neighborhood life. This gives power over criminal justice to voters who have little stake in how the justice system operates. Second, the suburban population of metropolitan counties mushroomed. This shift in local populations matters enormously, because prosecutors and judges are usually elected at the county level. Today, counties that include major cities have a much higher percentage of suburban voters than in the past. This means suburban voters, for whom crime is usually a minor issue, exercise more power over urban criminal justice than in the past.

"Third, jury trials, once common, became rare events. The overwhelming majority of criminal convictions, more than 95 percent, are by guilty plea, and most of those are the consequence of plea bargains. This change shifts power from the local citizens who sit in jury boxes to the less visible assistant district attorneys who decide whom to punish, and how severely. Fourth and finally, state legislators, members of Congress, and federal judges all came to exercise more power over criminal punishment than in the past. The details are complicated, how and why this change happened is one of this book's larger stories. But the bottom line is clear enough: a locally run justice system grew less localized, more centralized.

"All these changes limited the power of residents of poor city neighborhoods - the neighborhoods where levels of criminal violence are highest. Residents of those neighborhoods, most of whom are African American, have less ability than in the past to govern the police officers and prosecutors who govern them. As local democracy has faded, the rule of law has collapsed, discrimination has grown more common, and criminal punishment has become prone to extremes of lenity and severity. Here as elsewhere, correlation does not prove causation. But this coincidence seems more than coincidental. If criminal justice is to grow more just, those who bear the costs of crime and punishment alike must exercise more power over those who enforce the law and dole out punishment."

delanceyplace.com 12/6/11 - a european bank brings down the world

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - just as Europe is struggling in 2011 to contain a banking crisis, it struggled in 1930 - unsuccessfully - to contain another banking crisis. The results was a key element in turning the slump of 1929 into a worldwide Great Depression. In 1930, a year before the more renowned failure of the Bank of United States sent Americans into a panic, a series of major banking crises had created a worldwide recession which John Maynard Keynes referred to as "The Great Slump of 1930." While production around the world had plummeted, there was reasonable cause for optimism. There had been no major financial disaster or bankruptcy - and the U.S., at least, had recovered nicely from a similar slump in 1921.

The optimism turned out to be unfounded as debt problems in Austria swept through Europe and eventually the world economy and became one of the major causes of the Great Depression. "Arnold Toynbee ... would later compare the events of the summer of 1931 to the summer of 1914. Both began with relatively minor events far from the hub of the world that would nevertheless set in train a cascade that plunged out of all control and brought down an entire world order":

"On Friday, May 8, the Credit Anstalt, based in Vienna and founded in 1855 by the Rothschilds, with total assets of $250 million and 50% of the Austrian bank deposits, informed the government that it had been forced to book a loss of $20 million in its 1930 accounts, wiping out most of its equity. ... Austria was a small country, about the tenth the size of Germany, with a population of fewer than seven million and a GDP of $1.5 billion. Nevertheless, the news burst like a bombshell upon the City of London and the Bank of England."

"Like many German banks, the Credit Anstalt made direct investments in industry, similar to those of a modern private equity firm. It was, however, especially vulnerable not only because it borrowed short term money to finance what were long-term, highly illiquid investments, but also because it had an unusually large amount of foreign borrowing on its books."

"Fearing a monetary breakdown in Austria would spread to neighboring countries, Montagu Norman, [Chairman of the Bank of England] was determined to mount an international rescue effort. None of the central bankers had faced an international financial crisis before; they, therefore had to make things up as they went along. In doing so they made two mistakes. Given the scale of the problem, they came up with far too little money; and believing that it was necessary to put together as international a consortium as possible, they did not act quickly enough."

"The announcement of the rescue package failed to stabilize the situation, perhaps because more people knew how deep the problem went than the government realized. ... All banks in Hungary were closed for three days. In Danzig and Riga, in Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, banks were suspended. ... Germany faced an economic disaster. ... the collapse of the German banking system in the summer of 1931 sent the economy lurching downward again."

delanceyplace.com 12/5/11 - connery auditions for the role of bond

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Sean Connery, a marginally successful, hard-working young actor from a poor background, auditioned in 1962 for the role of James Bond in Dr. No. Bond, the sophisticated, impeccably-styled fictional hero of Ian Fleming's spy novels, had taken the British public by storm as the antidote to their enfeebled post-World War II status. A number of established actors were considered for the part - including Cary Grant, Michael Redgrave, and Richard Burton - though none were likely to handcuff themselves to a movie series, especially considering the low pay being offered. Connery was not an obvious candidate since he was not given to wearing suits, much less to Bond's sophistication. So he took a gamble in the audition to convey the power of Bond and thus startle the producers into giving him the part.

"At least initially, [director Terence] Young himself had other ideas for who should play the part, too, petitioning for a television actor named Richard Johnson to be given the part of Bond. When, however, it became clear to Young that Connery was seriously in the running for Dr No, he thought enough of the young pup he remembered from the Action of the Tiger shoot to offer him some advice for the meeting [co-producers Harry] Saltzman and [Cubby] Broccoli had invited him to. 'I knew how he dressed,' Young remembered in the eighties, '[so] I said, "Sean, come wearing a suit." He came without a tie on and wearing a sort of lumber jacket.'

"In fact, Connery seems to have approached the interview almost like a Method actor approaching a role. Those scruffy, unpressed clothes, the unadulterated Scots burr, they might have been put on in order to goad the producers into telling him he wasn't quite what they were looking for. That way, Connery could slam their desk with the palm of his hand and tell them that they either took him as he was or they didn't take him at all. Was he acting up, or was he just acting? Certainly, he had planned the whole thing out. 'I shall establish myself on Overpowering,' he told [acting teacher] Yat Malmgren a few days before the meeting, 'and take the interview like that. That would be a good thing, don't you think, sir?' Indeed Malmgren did, adding that Connery ought to be 'thinking about cat animals' during the proceedings because 'they are very loose'. 'I think he walked into that audition very self-assured, very large, very secure,' Malmgren would say years later. Or, as Connery himself would put it: 'I put on a bit of an act, and it paid off.'

"In putting on that act, Connery was giving Saltzman and Broccoli all they needed to know about how he'd play Bond - with macho, devil-may-care menace backed up by a Brando-style sense of relaxed rebellion. Indeed, the casting interview sounds like nothing so much as that Bond movie staple - the meeting 'twixt our surly, mocking, ironic hero and Bernard Lee's irascible M. As Harry Saltzman would recall: 'We spoke to him and saw that he had the masculinity the part needed. Whenever he wanted to make a point, he'd bang his fist on the table, the desk, or his thigh, and we knew this guy had something.'

"And so, after he left their West End offices, Connery's prospective producers went to the window and looked down as he crossed the road to where he had parked [his new wife] Diane Cilento's sexless little Fiat. 'He's got balls,' Saltzman said. 'In 30 minutes he sold us both,' Broccoli would remember. 'It was the sheer self-confidence he exuded. I've never seen a surer guy ... It wasn't just an act, either. When he left we watched him through the window as he walked down the street. He walked like the most arrogant son-of-a-gun you've ever seen - as if he owned every bit of Jermyn Street from Regent Street to St James's. 'That's our Bond,' I said.' "

delanceyplace.com 12/1/11 - extreme duress

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - in moments of extreme duress, such as the duress police experience during a shooting, human perception alters radically:

"Over a period of five years, [researcher Alexis] Artwohl gave hundreds of police officers a written survey to fill out about their shooting experiences. Her findings were remarkable: virtually all of the officers reported experiencing at least one major perceptual distortion. Most experienced several. For some, time moved in slow motion. For others, it sped up. Sounds intensified or disappeared altogether. Actions seemed to happen without conscious control. The mind played tricks. One officer vividly remembered seeing his partner 'go down in a spray of blood,' only to find him unharmed a moment later.

"Another believed a suspect had shot at him 'from down a long dark hallway about forty feet long'; revisiting the scene a day later, he found to his surprise that the suspect 'had actually been only about five feet in front of [him] in an open room.' Wrote one cop in a particularly strange anecdote, 'During a violent shoot-out I looked over ... and was puzzled to see beer cans slowly floating through the air past my face. What was even more puzzling was that they had the word Federal printed on the bottom. They turned out to be the shell casings ejected by the officer who was firing next to me.' ...

"The single distortion under fire that Artwohl heard about most, with a full 84 percent of the officers reporting it, was diminished hearing. In the jarring, electrifying heat of a deadly force encounter, Artwohl says, the brain focuses so intently on the immediate threat that all senses but vision often fade away. 'It's not uncommon for an officer to have his partner right next to him cranking off rounds from a shotgun and he has no idea he was even there,' she said. Some officers Artwohl interviewed recalled being puzzled during a shooting to hear their pistols making a tiny pop like a cap gun; one said he wouldn't even have known the gun was firing if not for the recoil. This finding is in line with what neuroscientists have long known about how the brain registers sensory data, Artwohl explains. 'The brain can't pay attention to all of its sensory inputs all the time,' she said. 'So in these shootings, the sound is coming into the brain, but the brain is filtering it out and ignoring it. And when the brain does that, to you it's like it never happened.'

"The brain's tendency to steer its resources into visually zeroing in on the threat also explains the second most common perceptual distortion under fire. Tunnel vision, reported by 79 percent of Artwohl's officers, occurs when the mind locks on to a target or threat to the exclusion of all peripheral information. Studies show that tunnel vision can reduce a person's visual field by as much as 70 percent, an experience that officers liken to looking through a toilet paper tube. The effect is so pronounced that some police departments now train their officers to quickly sidestep when facing an assailant, on the theory that they just might disappear from the criminal's field of sight for one precious moment.

"According to Artwohl's findings, the warping of reality under extreme stress often ventures into even weirder territory. For 62 percent of the officers she surveyed, time seemed to lurch into slow motion during their life-threatening encounter - a perceptual oddity frequently echoed in victims' accounts of emergencies like car crashes. In a 2006 study, however, the Baylor University neuroscientist David Eagleman tested this phenomenon by asking volunteers to try to read a rapidly flashing number on a watch while falling backwards into a net from atop a 150-foot-tall tower, a task that is terrifying just to read about. This digit blinked on and off too quickly for the human eye to spot it under normal conditions, so Eagleman figured that if extreme fear truly does slow down our experience of time, his plummeting subjects should be able to read it. They couldn't.

"The truth, psychologists believe, is that it's really our memory of the event that unfolds at the pace of molasses; during an intensely fear-provoking experience, the amygdala etches such a robustly detailed representation into the mind that in retrospect it seems that everything transpired slowly. Memories, after all, are notoriously unreliable, especially after an emergency. Sometimes they're eerily intricate, and yet other times vital details disappear altogether. 'Officers who were at an incident have pulled their weapon, fired it, and reholstered it, and later had absolutely no memory of doing it,' Artwohl told me. If your attention is focused like a laser on a threat (say, the guy shooting at you), Artwohl says, you may perform an action (such as firing your gun) so uncon- sciously and automatically that it fails to register in your memory banks."

delanceyplace.com 12/2/11 - young george harrison

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the relentless Nazi bombing of Liverpool left it scarred and resource starved. Out of this deprivation, its citizens - including young George Harrison and his friends - developed a sense of humor, a work ethic, and the hope of escape:

"There was an honesty that we had, a very simple, naive honesty, and I think that had a lot to do with where we came from. The people up there have a certain naive honesty and humour. They say you have to have humour to live in a place like that. Everybody who comes out of Liverpool thinks they are comedians, and we were no exception. That kept us going." GEORGE HARRISON

"During the war, Liverpool was the second biggest port in the empire, after London, with huge docks. It really did get hammered in the Blitz. You hear the story about Aunt Mimi dodging the bombs, going to the hospital when John [Lennon] was born. That's not an exaggeration. Liverpool got the shit bombed out of it. Post-war, our playgrounds were bombsites, which could be pretty dangerous. You got streets that just went off into nothing. We were very aware of the war. Near where George, Paul and I went to school at the Liverpool Institute, there was a church called St Luke's that had been firebombed. The whole church was just a burned-out shell. It's still there now as a reminder. There would always be a few kids who didn't have a father. It was never talked about, but you didn't know whether they were children of an American soldier or whether their father had died in the war." NEIL ASPINALL, Lifelong friend, CEO Apple Corps ...

"I always remember my Mum saying that they had been on the housing list to have another house for twenty-two years. In 1949 they eventually did get a house, and we moved to Speke in about 1950. Speke was a building site basically; there were no roads or anything. It was like two feet of mud everywhere. But it was a bigger house." PETER HARRISON, Brother

"There were numerous parks around Liverpool. People always think that Liverpool's a big built-up city, but if you could see it from the air I think you'd realise there are more parks there than in the majority of cities. When you were a little one you played on the bombsites but by and large weekends as a family we always used to go to a park somewhere - take some sandwiches and a bottle of water." HARRY HARRISON, Brother

"I used to live in a place called Speke, which is on the outskirts of Liverpool. My mother was a midwife, so she would keep getting moved to the outskirts. The roads were kind of unmade when we got there. It was frontier land. And George lived just down the road. It was a bus stop away. It was a road called Central Avenue, which was the main road, and then there was Western Avenue, and then half an hour away was the city, where our school was. And we both went to the same school. I would get on the bus, and then a stop later George would get on. So I'd see this kid with a quiff, but younger than me, so I wouldn't pay much attention, because I was cooler, I was older. But eventually he must have had a seat next to me on the bus, so that's how we met. Obviously going to the same school we had a bond. And then it turned out that we both loved rock 'n' roll, and guitars. He was a cocky little guy. He had a good sense of himself; he wasn't cowed by anything. He had a great haircut.

"Looking back now, it was pre-fame - we were just ordinary kids who couldn't get in places because we weren't famous. Teachers didn't like us. Rock 'n' roll hadn't properly arrived yet. I always think of it as kind of Dickensian. And the school that I went to with George, incidentally, was a very Dickensian old place. In fact, Dickens had talked there. That's how Dickensian it was. You grew up wanting to go somewhere else. It made you hungry, so art was a great golden vision. For us, we wouldn't have called it art, but rock 'n' roll." PAUL McCARTNEY

delanceyplace.com 11/30/11 - the rise of brazil

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

n today's excerpt - the jeito. In a country that is as populous as Brazil one must learn to overcome Brazil's bureaucratic constraints and inequality in regards to the distribution of wealth. So Brazilian's have developed jeito. Jeito's rough translation means "the way" or "quick fix". Brazilian's rely on the jeito as a way to overcome obstacles and roadblocks, which hinder their progress in getting what they want. Derived from the word driblando or "dribbling" such as in soccer, it symbolizes dexterity and finesse in overcoming your opponent or challenge. Oftentimes in a way that may not be legal or ethical.

"Some forms of the jeito are almost universal and are easily recognizable even to outsiders. If a policeman in a Brazilian city stops a car for exceeding the speed limit or making an illegal turn, the driver is likely to ask, "Officer, isn't there a way to find a jeitinho to resolve this?" Or if you want to be seated at a corner table at a chic restaurant at the peak of the dinner hour, some money slipped into the hand of the maitre d' may help get you what you want.

"But because so many institutions in Brazil are corrupt or inefficient or both, citizens are forced to band together and help each other to a larger extent than in many other places. Bureaucracy pervades everything from enrolling in school to getting electrical service or buying a house. Sometimes getting around laws or situations that are inconvenient involves a cash payment of a bribe, tip, or 'gratification.' Or it can involve other illegal means. So Brazilians find a jeito and create informal, parallel institutions or mechanisms to work around that problem. The emphasis is on exchanging favors or building the kind of durable personal relationship with someone who allows for favors to be asked. ...

"A jeito can also arise in response to deficiencies in the way a business operates. Until the 1990s, when the government-owned telecommunications company was privatized and the country was flooded with cellular phones, Brazil suffered from a chronic shortage of working telephone lines, and there was a long waiting list, up to a decade, to obtain a line. The jeito devised to deal with the situation was a black market in telephones. When an elderly person with a telephone died, ownership of that line would pass to heirs of the deceased. If they had phones of their own, they would sell the line to the highest bidder, sometimes going so far as to put an ad in the newspaper announcing the availability of a line. Rather than wait years and years, a person or company in urgent need of a phone line would pay $1,000 or more to have the line transferred to their use. This was an arrangement that left everyone involved happy, except perhaps the phone company itself. But since the company was seen as the cause of the problem, the impediment that had to be dribbled around, no one really cared much. ...

"Other common cases fall into a morally ambiguous area. Public hospitals in Brazil, for example, are chronically overcrowded and underfinanced. So let's suppose your mother is ill and has been told that no bed is available for her. But you have a friend who is a doctor. The jeito is applied by asking the doctor to intervene on your behalf, with the understanding that in return for admitting and attending to your mother, the doctor deserves a favor to be collected at some unspecified time. ...

"One of the ways in which the jeitinho has been formalized is through the institution of the despacbante, or dispatcher, especially in dealings with government bureaucracies. Suppose you want to obtain a driver's license without having to go through the normal procedures. You may simply be in a hurry and not want to wait. Or perhaps you haven't studied for the written test or have failed it in the past. Or maybe you don't know how to drive at all. The solution is to hire a despacbante who has cultivated a personal relationship of some sort with key employees at the driver's license bureau and can get you your license in record time.

"Many who resort to the jeitinho know they are doing something that they really shouldn't. But they shrug their shoulders and justify their actions with the phrase Nao tem outro jeito, 'There's no other way.' Since everyone at one time or another uses the jeitinho to resolve a problem, and many of those who have the ability to use the jeitinho do so all the time, odds are that no one will look askance at what you have done. The alternative is to play strictly by the rules and be classified as an otario, a dupe or sucker, an object of ridicule and derision, and no one wants to be in that category."

delanceyplace.com 11/29/11 - the most powerful man in america

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - decades before today's religious right began its well-organized political efforts, the Christian-based Anti-Saloon League (ASL) waged the most successful single issue lobbying effort in American history which culminated in Prohibition - the Eighteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Its political operations were headed by Wayne Bidwell Wheeler, whose efforts were responsible for the election defeat of hundreds of legislators across the country and whose organization was sending out ten tons of political literature each day by 1912. Mild-mannered in appearance but described as "a locomotive in trousers," Wheeler's efforts started in locally in Ohio, where he targeted seventy sitting legislators and defeated every one of them - and later became "recognized by friend and foe alike as the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States":

"By 1903, the year Wheeler became the ASL's Ohio superintendent, the league had targeted seventy sitting legislators of both parties (nearly half the entire legislative membership) and had defeated every one of them.

"The newly elected Ohio legislature installed that year was custom-built by the ASL-Wayne B.Wheeler, general contractor. Now it could enact a law that had long been the league's primary goal: a local-option bill placing power over the saloon directly in the hands of voters. If Cincinnatians voted wet, Cincinnati would be wet, and if Daytonians voted dry, their town would be dry. Once different versions of the measure had passed both houses of the legislature, Governor Myron T. Herrick persuaded members of the conference committee to adopt some modifications he deemed necessary to make the law workable and equitable. 'Conference committees are dangerous,' Wheeler believed, partly because they made it possible for governors to step in and preempt the ASL's legislative agenda. Playing for stakes greater than those the league had ever risked before, Wheeler decided to take on Herrick.

"He was not an easy target. A successful lawyer and banker in Cleveland, Herrick was the political creation of Senator Mark Hanna, the Republican Boss of Bosses who had also invented William O. McKinley. Herrick had been elected governor with the largest plurality in Ohio history, had substantial campaign funds of his own, and had gladdened many a church-minded heart when he vetoed a bill that would have legalized racetrack betting. Additionally, Ohio Republicans had lost only one gubernatorial election in two decades.

"Wheeler and the ASL crushed him. They sponsored more than three hundred anti-Herrick rallies throughout the state, mobilizing their supporters in the churches by invoking Herrick's role in modifying the local-option bill and by suggesting that the governor - 'the champion of the murder mills' - was a conscious pawn of the liquor interests. When the Brewers' Association sent out a confidential letter urging its members to lend quiet but material support to Herrick (his Democratic opponent was a vocal temperance advocate), Wheeler said he 'got [a copy of the letter] on Thursday before election, photographed it and sent out thousands of them to churches on Sunday.' In what was at the time the largest turnout ever for an Ohio gubernatorial election, every other Republican on the statewide ticket was elected, but Myron T. Herrick's political career was over. ...

" 'Never again,' Wheeler said, 'will any political party ignore the protests of the church and the moral forces of the state.' Or, more accurately, never again would they ignore Wayne B. Wheeler, who was now launched on a national career that would eventually make him, in the words of an ASL associate, the figure who 'controlled six Congresses, dictated to two Presidents ..., directed legislation for the most important elective state and federal offices, held the balance of power in both Republican and Democratic parties, distributed more patronage than any dozen other men, supervised a federal bureau from the outside without official authority, and was recognized by friend and foe alike as the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States.' "

delanceyplace.com 11/28/11 - how to write jokes

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:53:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in an interview with Franklyn Ajaye, Jerry Seinfeld states that the key to his comedy is the discipline of sitting down and writing. And being left-handed

Franklyn Ajaye: Describe your method of getting into writing a routine.

Jerry Seinfeld: I believe in having a structured approach. My philosophy is that I can sit down at any time with a problem, and if I sit there and don't allow my mind to have distractions - no phone, no music, no television - my mind will eventually start to work on it on its own. It's like a biosphere situation. I isolate myself - 'cause this is my 'sit' time.

FA: How long do you try to write or sit?

JS: I say, 'I'm going to sit for an hour.' I always consider sitting the accomplishment. If I could boil it down to the essence of becoming a really fine comedian, it's just getting your ass from upright to seated.

FA: Was this your approach when you first started developing material?

JS: This was my approach from the very beginning. At first I'd just go on stage and try this and try that, but I soon felt that I had to have a better system than that if I was going to survive the talk shows. I had to figure out how I was going to create material on a dependable basis. That is the number one problem that a comedian has to confront in the early years, so that when the time comes that the demand is put on you to appear on a show like The Tonight Show three or four times a year, you can come up with the material.

FA: So your first sit-down goal was an hour a day?

JS: Yes. An hour a day. That was my first goal. Ten hours a month. That's not easy for someone starting out, and it took me a couple of years to accomplish. Sometimes I had to trick myself to get myself to write. You wouldn't believe the things I had to do to get myself to write. Sometimes I'd put the cookies by my notebook. It's like a mousetrap - I go get the cookies, then I look in the notebook, and the next thing I know, I'm writing.

FA: How do you pick a subject to write about?

JS: That's just an instinct. Frankly, I think you've gotta be born with that. I look at something and go, 'That's weird, there's something funny about it. I don't know what it is, but I betcha if I think about it, I can figure it out.'

FA: What was the subject matter of the first routine you wrote?

JS: It was about being left-handed-about how everything in society is set up against us. It was about discrimination. (Laughing) So you can see that even at the beginning, it was very political. By the way, most comedians are left-handed. Way more than the general population.

delanceyplace.com 11/25/11 - the boldness of igor stravinsky

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the most famous scandal in the history of classical music was the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps). The boldness of Stravinsky's work stood in intriguing juxtaposition against the fastidiousness of his work habits:

"All the excitement [of Igor Stravinsky's early career] was nothing against the impact of Le Sacre du printemps, which had its premiere on May 29, 1913 [when he was thirty]. Stravinsky had conceived the idea for it while working on Firebird. 'I dreamed of a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death.' Work on Le Sacre was dropped for Petrushka, but Stravinsky soon resumed work on the new ballet. (He has said that The Coronation of Spring would be closer to his original meaning than the usual translation, The Rite of Spring.) Vaslav Nijinsky was the choreographer, and the premiere resulted in the most famous scandale in the history of music. Hardly anybody in the audience was prepared for a score of such dissonance and ferocity, such complexity and such rhythmic oddity.

"Nobody connected with the production had the faintest idea that the music would provoke a visceral reaction. As soon as the bassoon ended its phrase in the high register, at the very opening of the ballet, laughter broke out. Soon there were whistles and catcalls. Nobody could hear the music. Diaghilev had the electricians switch the house lights off and on, in an effort to restore order. Nijinsky, in the wings, yelled the rhythms to the dancers. The Comtesse de Pourtales stood in her box, brandishing her fan, and shouted: 'This is the first time in sixty years that anybody has dared make fun of me.' People hurled insults at each other. The Apaches, [a musical school of thought] headed by Ravel, shrieked their praise. Stravinsky himself, in his Expositions and Developments, has described the famous evening at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees:

"Mild protests against the music could be heard from the very beginning of the performance. Then, when the curtain opened ... the storm broke. Cries of 'Ta gueule' (shut up!) came from behind me. I heard Florent Schmitt shout 'Taisez-vouz garces du seizieme' (be quiet, bitches of the sixteenth!); the 'garces' of the sixteenth arondissement were, of course, the most elegant ladies in Paris. The uproar continued, however, and a few minutes later I left the hall in a rage; I was sitting on the right near the orchestra, and I remember slamming the door. I have never again been that angry. The music was familiar to me; I loved it, and I could not understand why people who had not yet heard it wanted to protest in advance. I arrived in a fury backstage, where I saw Diaghilev flicking the house lights in a last effort to quiet the hall. For the rest of the performance I stood in the wings behind Nijinsky holding the tails of his frac while he stood on a chair shouting numbers to the dancers like a coxswain.

"[Yet] everything about Stravinsky pointed to an intellectual tidiness, and that included his work habits. Those were tidy to the point of compulsion. In 1916, the Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz, who was working with Stravinsky on L'Histoire du soldat, looked at Stravinsky's work table and marveled:

"Stravinsky's scores are magnificent. He is above all (in all matters and in every sense of the word) a calligrapher. . . . His writing desk resembled a surgeon's instrument case. Bottles of different colored inks in their ordered hierarchy each had a separate part to play in the ordering of his art. Near at hand were india-rubbers of various kinds and shapes, and all sorts of glittering steel implements: rulers, erasers, pen-knives, and a roulette instrument for drawing staves, invented by Stravinsky himself. One was reminded of the definition of St. Thomas: beauty is the splendor of order. All the large pages of the score were filled with writing in different colored inks - blue, green, red, two kinds of black (ordinary and Chinese), each having its purpose, its meaning, its special use: one for the notes, another the text, a third the translation; one for titles, another for the musical directions. Meanwhile the bar lines were ruled, and the mistakes carefully erased."

delanceyplace.com 11/23/11 - thanksgiving and the discovery of america

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the discovery of America. Author Tony Horwitz muses on the discovery of America after hearing from a Plymouth Rock tour guide named Claire that the most common question from tourists was why the date etched on the rock was 1620 instead of 1492:

" 'People think Columbus dropped off the Pilgrims and sailed home.' Claire had to patiently explain that Columbus's landing and the Pilgrims' arrival occurred a thousand miles and 128 years apart. ...

"By the time the first English settled, other Europeans had already reached half of the forty-eight states that today make up the continental United States. One of the earliest arrivals was Giovanni da Verrazzano, who toured the Eastern Seaboard in 1524, almost a full century before the Pilgrims arrived. ... Even less remembered are the Portuguese pilots who steered Spanish ships along both coasts of the continent in the sixteenth century, probing upriver to Bangor Maine and all the way to Oregon. ... In 1542 Spanish conquistadors completed a reconnaissance of the continent's interior: scaling the Appalachians, rafting the Mississippi, peering down the Grand Canyon and galloping as far inland as central Kansas. ...

"The Spanish didn't just explore: they settled from the Rio Grande to the Atlantic. Upon founding St. Augustine, the first European city on U.S. soil, the Spanish gave thanks and dined with Indians - fifty-six years before the Pilgrim Thanksgiving at Plymouth. ... Plymouth, it turned out, wasn't even the first English colony in New England. That distinction belonged to Fort St. George in Popham, Maine. Nor were the Pilgrims the first to settle Massachusetts. In 1602 a band of English built a fort on the island of Cuttyhunk. They came not for religious freedom but to get rich from digging sassafras, a commodity prized in Europe as a cure for the clap. ...

"The Pilgrims and later the Americans who pushed west from the Atlantic didn't pioneer a virgin wilderness. They occupied a land long since transformed by European contact. ... Samoset, the first Indian the Pilgrims met at Plymouth, greeted the settlers in English. The first thing he asked for was beer."

delanceyplace.com 11/22/11 - writing jokes

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - stand-up comedian Jay Sankey offers his advice on writing and editing jokes to aspiring stand-up comedians. His advice has application to all forms of communication:

" 'Never use a long word where a short one will do.'

-George Orwell

"Unlike you, the audience hasn't heard your jokes a thousand times. Every single word is new to them, and there's a good chance they've been drinking. Also, when writing material it's always a good idea to keep in mind the fact that the people who make up the audiences in a comedy club come from many different cultural, intellectual, and educational backgrounds.

"Consequently, effective and trustworthy stand-up material is often simple and direct. ... Writing material that has broad appeal and is expressed in clear and simple terms is very different from writing material that is dumb or uninspired. In fact, if you feel that you have to 'talk down to the crowd,' you are probably selling both yourself (and your audience!) short.

"Almost every comic I've ever talked with has at some time felt disheartened by the apparent limitations of stand-up audiences. But despite my own difficult experiences, I still firmly believe this: Comedy club audiences consist of people with a wide range of life experiences, as well as dreams and disappointments and fears. And I too am a person with a wide range of life experiences, dreams, disappointments, and fears. As different as we may all be, we still have a great deal in common, and it is to the stuff we all have in common, our experiences as well as our imaginings, that the most successful stand-up material refers. Any limitations you perceive in your audience are more often an expression of your own limitations as a thinker and a communicator than anything else.

"To me, the real challenge of writing stand-up is not to make my stuff as 'dumb' as possible (anyone can do that!) but to express the abstract, imaginative, and unusual thoughts I have in terms that are as simple and clearas possible. Keep in mind, the act of simplification can be a sign of real intelligence and dedication. It's far easier to express strange and wonderful things in strange and wonderful terms. The inspired, imaginative, and even eloquent use of common, everyday language is a true challenge, worthy of any word-smith. The eloquent use of simple words rather than the simple use of eloquent words. Speak your truth and speak it plainly. ... As someone once said, 'If you have an idea and you can't write it down on a matchbook, it's probably not an important idea.' ...

" 'If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.'

-George Orwell

"Aggressive editing is very important in joke writing in general, but particularly so when it comes to punchlines. If you take a few moments longer to blow up a balloon, no big deal. But every beat that passes between the moment you begin to pull the pin out of your pocket and the moment you actually burst the balloon is a beat that takes that tiny bit more of the edge off of the surprise.

"Though an audience will be more forgiving of unnecessary words in a set-up than in a punchline, you still must be very strict on yourself when writing a set-up, especially given audiences expectations. ... Remember, the longer the set-up, the stronger the punchline must be. In reference to a joke with an overly long set-up, Will Rogers once said, 'That porch is too big for that house.'"

delanceyplace.com 11/21/11 - without love, the schoolroom is forbidding

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Alan (A.A.) Milne, the author and playwright who later became world famous for Winnie the Pooh, grew up in the 1880s with his older brothers in the small British schoolhouse where his father, John (J.V.) Milne, was the headmaster. Because John came from poverty, he lacked qualifications and was only able to become headmaster at rougher schools. Yet he led these with affection and good humor:

"In the rough schools to which his lack of academic qualifications condemned him ... J.V. needed, and had, the two great qualities, courage and a sense of humour.

"The middle son, Ken , is on record as having said at the age of three that his father had 'too much laugh' for a schoolteacher. And Alan tells a story which

splendidly demonstrates not only his father's sense of humour, but also his willingness to admit he had made a mistake. One day the [school] Matron had, unknown to anyone else, asked a boy to fetch her glasses just as everyone was about to have dinner. J.V. Milne admonished the boy for his lateness and, without letting him explain, told him to push in his chair and eat his first course standing, the regular mild punishment for lateness.

"When at last told he might take his chair, the boy got the chance to explain. 'Please, sir. Matron sent me upstairs for her spectacles just as I was coming in.'

"Awed silence. 'Sucks for J.V.,' the boys are thinking. 'He'll have to apologize.' The younger assistant masters look up anxiously. Do schoolmasters ever apologize? Isn't it bad for discipline?

" 'Then in that case,' says J.V. Milne, wishing to get it quite clear. 'It wasn't your fault you were late?'

" 'Please, sir. No, sir.'

" 'Oh!' Everybody is waiting. 'Oh, well, then, you'd better take two chairs.' And everybody laughs and is happy.

"There was a great deal of laughter and happiness at Henley House. At one stage the boys were asked in a typical test paper ('not tests of what a boy has learned, but intended to make him think') to name the things in the world that appeared to them most beautiful.The responses were on the whole predictable: moonlit nights, picturesque ruins, lakes with swans swimming, a field of flax in flower, the sun setting at sea. But the reply which brought the warmest response from the headmaster was - 'a boy with a smiling countenance'. He annotated this 'Et moi aussi'. J.V Milne's delight was in the happiness of his pupils - true happiness, of course, not the spurious happiness of the indulged.

"It was a family school and a school with an unusual method of awarding prizes. It was not quite a case of 'Everybody has won, and all must have prizes', but a boy was competing only against himself and not against the other boys. As long as he received 75 per cent of the possible marks, he received a prize. 'There was no danger of emulation becoming envy.' In December 1882 the boys received their prizes from Mr Milne's two children, Barry and Ken, aged three and a half and two years, sitting on a table surrounded by books. Alan was presumably there too, aged eleven months, sitting on a friendly knee.

"It was a school full of love. 'Without affection,' J.V. Milne once wrote, 'the schoolroom is a hard, forbidding place. With love, it becomes the next best place to home.' For the Milne boys, of course, school and home were in- extricably entwined. As soon as he is old enough to think about it, Alan can hardly wait to be a proper Henley House schoolboy."

delanceyplace.com 11/18/11 - "books nearly eleven feet tall"

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:27:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in the 1800s, new printing technologies led to an explosion of new books. The total value of books sold increased from $3.5 million to $12.5 million between 1830 and 1860, and the number of magazines grew from under 100 to over 600 between 1825 and 1850. Prominent among the new books were ornate gift books and "mammoth weeklies" - the largest reaching nearly eleven feet tall. With the current explosion of blogs and other writings on the internet, some people lament the unchecked libel, plagiarism, and lack of fact-checking - and hold printed newspapers, magazines and books as examples of responsible behavior. Yet similar charges were being made against printed publications in the 1800s:

"A rapid succession of technological and economic innovations in the early nineteenth century transformed the early republican period's largely artisanal print shops into a major commercial industry. Improvements to the flat-bed press in the 1810s and 1820s, the introduction of horsepower in the 1820s and steam power a few years later, and the invention of the cylinder press in the 1830s greatly sped up production rates, as did the development of the stereotyping and electrotyping processes in the 1810s and 1840s, respectively. Former hand processes like paper and board manufacturing, typesetting, and binding were swiftly mechanized. By 1830 a single machine could make paper on rolls (rather than sheet by sheet, as hand production required) and cut it to size.

"The introduction in the 1820s of cased bindings, covers assembled separately and then sewn to the printed pages, was especially transformative. In the past, publishers had generally issued books in paper wrappers or pasteboard covers, which readers then had bound as they chose or could afford. Cased bindings allowed publishers to issue books in uniform editions with fixed prices. For sure sellers, publishers would produce books in multiple bindings, each tailored to different tastes and budgets; thus in 1856 a reader looking for Irving's Sketch-Book could buy an edition bound in cloth for $1.25, with illustrations and gilt decoration for $2.25, or in elegant morocco covers for $3.50.

"Improved paper-making and binding techniques made possible two of the most spectacular feats of antebellum print technology: the ornate gift books, or literary annuals, which flourished around mid-century, and the 'mammoth weeklies' of the 1840s. Published at the end of the year to be exchanged as holiday presents, gift books compiled sentimental poetry, short fiction, and essays, but the real appeal lay in their alluring exteriors: heavily embossed leather or watered silk bindings bedecked with elaborate ornaments, color illustrations, marbled endpapers, copious amounts of gilding, and even mother-of-pearl. The mammoth weeklies also capitalized on visual impact. Gigantic newspapers containing fiction (usually British reprints), some news, and usually incongruous illustrations, the mammoths competed to offer the largest editions; when the Universal Yankee Nation (motto: 'The Largest Paper in All Creation') emerged as the victor, it reached nearly eleven feet tall. ...

"The unmoored claims of the printed book elicited constant questions from its very beginnings: Was it a 'true copy' or did it misrepresent the manuscript, intentionally or unintentionally? Did the author named really write it? Was it the kind of text its title purported it to be? Could its contents be trusted? Moreover, the print culture of the early nineteenth-century United States possessed a peculiar volatility all its own: it was a 'culture of reprinting,' in Meredith McGill's words, in which 'circulation outstripped authorial and editorial control.' ... In the whirl of reprinting, no text was fixed. Magazine editors regularly republished each other's articles, British and American 'bookaneers' competed to issue first editions on each shore or undersell existing editions, and writers often found their words altered, cut, rearranged, or attributed to others, or had unfamiliar words attributed to them. Printed texts cited, commented upon, and reappropriated each other to an extent that compares with the most viral internet meme. ...

"Gift books more starkly illustrate the dubious achievements of antebellum literary publishing, for next to their sumptuousness, their most characteristic feature was their spuriousness. Publishers routinely repackaged pages from old gift books in new bindings, took pages from unsold periodicals and rebound them as gift books, or erased the gilt date from the bindings of the old annuals and restamped them with the current year, much as a counterfeiter would erase the dollar amount from a bill and replace it with a higher number."

delanceyplace.com 11/17/11 - the ascendance of berlin

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - until 1871, the land that is now Germany had been a loose affiliation of small, sovereign states that had emerged from the Holy Roman Empire, and only became a single, unified country after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In the nationalistic fervor that followed, it became the second-leading industrial power in the world, and sought to build up its capital, Berlin, to world-class status. Young Max Planck entered Berlin in 1874 to pursue the re-emerging discipline of physics, and soon became one of history's scientific giants, founding quantum theory and paving the way for Bohr and Einstein:

"In October 1874, aged sixteen, Max Planck enrolled at Munich University and opted to study physics because of a burgeoning desire to understand the workings of nature. In contrast to the near-militaristic regime of the Gymnasiums (high schools), German universities allowed their students almost total freedom. With hardly any academic supervision and no fixed requirements, it was a system that enabled students to move from one university to another, taking courses as they pleased. Sooner or later those wishing to pursue an academic career took the courses by the pre-eminent professors at the most prestigious universities. After three years at Munich, where he was told 'it is hardly worth entering physics anymore' because there was nothing important left to discover, Planck moved to the leading university in the German-speaking world, Berlin.

"With the creation of a unified Germany in the wake of the Prussian-led victory over France in the war of 1870-71, Berlin became the capital of a mighty new European nation. Situated at the confluence of the Havel and the Spree rivers, French war reparations allowed its rapid redevelopment as it sought to make itself the equal of London and Paris. A population of 865,000 in 1871 swelled to nearly 2 million by 1900, making Berlin the third-largest city in Europe. Among the new arrivals were Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, especially the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. Inevitably the cost of housing and living soared, leaving many homeless and destitute. Manufacturers of cardboard boxes advertised 'good and cheap boxes for habitation' as shanty towns sprung up in parts of the city.

"Despite the bleak reality that many found on arriving in Berlin, Germany was entering a period of unprecedented industrial growth, technological progress, and economic prosperity. Driven largely by the abolition of internal tariffs after unification and French war compensation, by the outbreak of the First World War Germany's industrial output and economic power would be second only to the United States. By then it was producing over two-thirds of continental Europe's steel, half its coal, and was generating more electricity than Britain, France and Italy combined. Even the recession and anxiety that affected Europe after the stock market crash of 1873 only slowed the pace of German development for a few years.

"With unification came the desire to ensure that Berlin, the epitome of the new Reich, had a university second to none. Germany's most renowned physicist, Herman von Helmholtz, was enticed from Heidelberg. A trained surgeon, Helmholtz was also a celebrated physiologist who had made fundamental contributions to understanding the workings of the human eye after his invention of the ophthalmoscope. The 50-year-old polymath knew his worth. Apart from a salary several times the norm, Helmholtz demanded a magnificent new physics institute. It was still being built in 1877 when Planck arrived in Berlin and began attending lectures in the university's main building, a former palace on Unter den Linden opposite the Opera House."

delanceyplace.com 11/16/11 - human brains versus animal brains

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:11:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - there are over ten trillion cells in the human body - some estimates are far higher - and one hundred billion in the brain alone, yet all these are disproportionately affected and governed by the eighty thousand spindle cells that are involved in handling emotion and moral judgment. (Spindle cells are found in abundance in the anterior cingulate cortex, which has strong connections to the amygdala - the site where our first emotional judgments begin):

"[We are attempting] to [better] understand how human brains differ from those of other mammals. The answer is that the differences are slight but critical, and they help us discern how the brain processes emotion and related feelings. ... [A] key distinguishing feature is that emotionally charged situations appear to be handled by special cells called spindle cells, which are found only in humans and some great apes. These neural cells are large, with long neural filaments called apical dendrites that connect extensive signals from many other brain regions. This type of 'deep' interconnectedness, in which certain neurons provide connections across numerous regions, is a feature that occurs increasingly as we go up the evolutionary ladder. It is not surprising that the spindle cells, involved as they are in handling emotion and moral judgment, would have this form of deep interconnectedness, given the complexity of our emotional reactions.

"What is startling, however, is how few spindle cells there are: only about 80,000 in the human brain (about 45,000 in the right hemisphere and 35,000 in the left hemisphere). This disparity appears to account for the perception that emotional intelligence is the province of the right brain, although the disproportion is modest. Gorillas have about 16,000 of these cells, bonobos about 2,100, and chimpanzees about 1,800. Other mammals lack them completely. ...

"These findings [regarding spindle cells and related activities] are consistent with a growing consensus that our emotions are closely linked to areas of the brain that contain maps of the body, a view promoted by Dr. Antonio Damasio at the University of Iowa. They are also consistent with the view that a great deal of our thinking is directed toward our bodies: protecting and enhancing them, as well as attending to their myriad needs and desires.

"A tiny area at the front of the right insula [of the brain] is called the fronto-insular cortex. This is the region containing the spindle cells, and fMRI scans have revealed that it is particularly active when a person is dealing with high-level emotions such as love, anger, sadness, and sexual desire. Situations that strongly activate the spindle cells include when a subject looks at her romantic partner or hears her child crying. ...

"Interestingly, spindle cells do not exist in newborn humans but begin to appear only at around the age of four months and increase significantly from ages one to three. Children's ability to deal with moral issues and perceive such higher-level emotions as love develop during this same time period.

"The spindle cells gain their power from the deep interconnectedness of their long apical dendrites with many other brain regions. The high-level emotions that the spindle cells process are affected, thereby, by all of our perceptual and cognitive regions. ... It is remarkable how few neurons appear to be exclusively involved with these emotions. We have fifty billion neurons in the cerebellum that deal with skill formation, billions in the cortex that perform the transformations for perception and rational planning, but only about eighty thousand spindle cells dealing with high-level emotions. It is important to point out that the spindle cells are not doing rational problem solving, which is why we don't have rational control over our responses to music or over falling in love."

delanceyplace.com 11/15/11 - charter schools from the rubble

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - after the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, officials chose to engineer a wholesale shift to charter schools instead of fully rebuilding the public school system. For proponents of charter schools, this was a breakthrough victory. For opponents of these schools, it was an insidious development:

"One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was Milton Friedman, grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism and the man credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hypermobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, [he] nonetheless found the strength to write an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. 'Most New Orleans schools are in ruins,' Friedman observed, 'as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.'

"Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions, many run at a profit, that would be subsidized by the state. It was crucial, Friedman wrote, that this fundamental change not be a stopgap but rather 'a permanent reform.'

"A network of right-wing think tanks seized on Friedman's proposal and descended on the city after the storm. The administration of George W. Bush backed up their plans with tens of millions of dollars to convert New Orleans schools into 'charter schools,' publicly funded institutions run by private entities according to their own rules. Charter schools are deeply polarizing in the United States, and nowhere more than in New Orleans, where they are seen by many African-American parents as a way of reversing the gains of the civil rights movement, which guaranteed all children the same standard of education. For Milton Friedman, however, ... providing free education, was an unfair interference in the market.

"In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid was brought back online, the auctioning off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within nineteen months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4. Before that storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31. New Orleans teachers used to be represented by a strong union; now the union's contract had been shredded, and its forty-seven hundred members had all been fired. Some of the younger teachers were rehired by the charters, at reduced salaries; most were not.

"New Orleans was now, according to The New York Times, 'the nation's preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools.' "

delanceyplace.com 11/14/11 - most early americans were not free

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - most early Americans, if you exclude the important category of Native Americans, were African slaves, convicts from Britain who were forcibly shipped to America, and indentured servants:

"More than 50,000 convicted felons were ... uprooted from their families and friends in Great Britain between 1718 and 1775 and forced to travel overseas to begin new lives as indentured servants in the American colonies. The number of convicts who made this trip was not insignificant. During these years, one out of every four British immigrants who landed in America was a convict. To put the 50,000 number in even more perspective, when Britain regularly started sending convicts to the American colonies in 1718, the white population of Maryland was around 50,000. And in 1765 - 10 years before convict transportation to America came to an end - the entire population of Boston was only 15,520. All told, British convicts constituted one of the largest groups of people ever to be forced to immigrate to America, second only to African slaves....

"Almost as soon as convict transportation to America came to an end, Americans began to downplay the number and significance of criminals sent to the colonies. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson led the way by claiming:

" 'The Malefactors sent to America were not sufficient in number to merit enumeration as one class out of three which peopled America. It was at a late period of their history that the practice began. I have no book by me which enables me to point out the date of its commencement. But I do not think the whole number sent would amount to 2000 & being principally men eaten up with disease, they married seldom & propagated little. I do not suppose that themselves & their descendants are at present 4000, which is little more than one thousandth part of the whole inhabitants.'

"If Jefferson truly believed what he wrote, he should have known better. In the period leading up to when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, the British were sending nearly 1,000 convicts to America every year, and about half of them ended up in his home colony of Virginia. ... Only in the latter part of the 20th century did historians finally begin to research convict transportation to America in a serious and systematic way. Today, historians generally agree on the 50,000 number. ...

"Convict transportation adds new dimensions to popular notions of im- migration to early America that go beyond Pilgrims and brave men crossing the Atlantic in search of religious freedom and unlimited opportunity in a new, untamed land. Most of the people transported to America were ... petty criminals who came out of the ranks of the destitute poor. In fact, most people who came to America during this time arrived under similar circumstances as Bell's, whether they were a convict or not. Between 1700 and 1775, a total of 585,800 immigrants arrived in the 13 colonies from all over the world. About 52,200 of these immigrants were convicts and prisoners (9%). Slaves by far constituted the largest group (278,400; 47%), followed by people arriving with their freedom (151,600; 26%) and indentured servants (96,600; 18%). Note that almost three-quarters of all the people arriving in the American colonies during this time period did so without their freedom."

delanceyplace.com 11/11/11 - busch marries anheuser

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Adolphus Busch, the brewer who was one of the grand personalities of 19th century America, had a cannon fired every time he returned from a trip. His leadership within the brewery industry put him at the forefront of many campaigns in the decades-long battle against prohibition laws:

"The most forceful advocate of the brewers' anti-Prohibition campaign was the most accomplished man in the industry, Adolphus Busch. The youngest of twenty-one children of a prosperous Rhineland merchant, Busch immigrated to the United States in 1857, went into the brewery supply business, and in 1861, at twenty-two, married Lilly Anheuser, the daughter of one of his customers. (The familial bond did not lack for further adhesive, as Adolphus's brother Ulrich married Lilly's sister Anna.) Adolphus soon took over the management of his father-in-law's company and in time appended his surname to it.

"Busch was a genuine visionary. Where others saw brewing as a fairly straight- forward enterprise, he saw it as the core of a vertically integrated series of businesses. He built glass factories and ice plants. He acquired railway companies to ferry coal from mines he owned in Illinois to the vast Anheuser-Busch factory complex sprawled across seventy acres of St. Louis riverfront. (A local joke: St. Louis was "a large city on the [banks of the] Mississippi, located near the Anheuser-Busch plant.") Busch got into the business of manufacturing refrigerated rail cars and truck bodies that could be used not just by breweries but also by such substantial customers as the Armour meatpacking company. He paid one million dollars for exclusive U.S. rights to a novel engine technology developed by his countryman Rudolf Diesel, and for $30,000 purchased the painting of Custer's Last Stand that, with the Anheuser-Busch logotype prominently appended, would soon grace the walls of thousands upon thousands of saloons. In 1875 Busch produced thirty-five thousand barrels of beer; by 1901, his annual output - primarily of a light lager named for the Bohemian town of Budweis - surpassed a million barrels. ...

"Adolphus had a potent personal aura. He spoke five languages, built palaces for himself and his wife in St. Louis, Pasadena, Cooperstown, and Wiesbaden, and traveled in a style appropriate for the monarch he was. Whenever Adolphus and Lilly returned from a trip to their home at Number One Busch Place (situated right on company property in St. Louis), brewery employees fired a cannon. Coupled with his company's preeminence in the industry, his grand manner enabled him to dominate industry councils. This became especially clear in 1903, when he helped craft an agreement, eventually signed by nine breweries, to fund a committee 'promoting anti-prohibition matters in Texas,' one of Anheuser-Busch's largest markets.

"When some brewers expressed an unwillingness to continue underwriting the committee's activities, Busch argued, 'It may cost us millions and even more,' he wrote, 'but what of it if thereby we elevate our position?' He concluded his appeal by offering another $100,000 of Anheuser-Busch support for the Texas campaign, money that would help fund such 'anti-prohibition matters' as paying the poll taxes of blacks and Mexican-Americans who were expected to vote for legal beer, purchasing the editorial support of newspapers (according to an internal report, 'We have sent checks in advance, and the average country editor, struggling to make a living, hates to return checks'), and engaging in some rather more mysterious activities. In 1910, after the brewers' political agent in east-central Texas was able to undo a dry victory in Robertson County, he explained that he had engineered the reversal through means that 'are best not written about.'

"Busch's motives went beyond the merely pecuniary: 'Besides losing our business by state-wide prohibition,' he wrote during the Texas battle, 'we would lose our honor and standing of ourselves and our families, and rather than lose that, we should risk the majority of our fortunes.' It was the sort of call to arms that inspired both employees and competitors, and that led to something of a national festival in 1911, when Adolphus and Lilly's golden anniversary was marked by celebrations in thirty-five cities. A similar nationwide outpouring of respect and love from the brewing industry occurred two years later, when Adolphus Busch died, at the age of seventy-four, from cirrhosis of the liver."

delanceyplace.com 11/10/11 - the role of eunuchs

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - eunuchs: those castrated servants who performed a wide variety of functions for kings in ancient and more recent times. The special value of eunuchs (literally bed-keepers) to kings and other high-ranking officials was that they could be better trusted since they had no desire for the wives and other women of the court, did not have the distractions of family life, and were thought to have less ambition. Here we see eunuchs in the capital of Constantinople circa the fifth century CE:

"Eunuchs gave the palace at Constantinople a special atmosphere. They were men who had been sexually damaged by disease, accident or deliberate mutilation. Mutilation, as horrible as it sounds, was not always or only conscious cruelty inasmuch as eunuchry was a path to power and safety for the marginal or the vulnerable. One source speaks of the Abasgi outside Roman territory at the eastern end of the Black Sea (modern Abkhazia retains the name), whose king sold boys for castration and killed their parents. If the fatality rate on these castrations was about ninety-five percent, few cared and the survivors might feel themselves lucky in many ways.

"So normal a part of the landscape did the eunuchs seem, and so easily was their involuntary sexual isolation compared with religiously approved abstinence, that in later times when exegetes read of the service of the prophet Daniel at Nebuchadnezzar's court, they naturally assumed - meaning it as a respectful interpretation - that he must have been a eunuch too. On a higher level, the angels and their sexlessness gave sexless males below a kind of respectability. The general Narses, who replaced Belisarius and finally brought grim peace to Italy for [the emperor] Justinian, was a eunuch. By the eighth century a eunuch could even rise to the patriarchal throne in Constantinople.

"At the pinnacle of the household was the grand chamberlain, always a eunuch and thus supposedly without family interest to corrupt his service, responsible for every aspect of management and control. He supervised the silentiaries (court officials) with their golden wands, who offered discreet guidance and control to ensure that all would be orderly and impressive, and whose influence could thus incidentally mean a great deal. On retirement they were normally admitted to the senate."

delanceyplace.com 11/9/11 - how to reduce crime

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:39:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the national murder rate is down, but for young black men it is up dramatically. The pessimism of some is so profound that they have started RIP Facebook pages to prepare for their death. And the cause - at least as it relates to the issue of prevention - has less to do with pervasive, unmanageable moral issues or the availability of such things as handguns than with the acts of a very small number of well known young men. It was not a "huge, amorphous, and deeply rooted problem that needed a similarly huge response." It was small enough that a more modest amount of resources, properly targeted and reasonably applied, could make a profoundly positive difference:

"Everybody knows crime is down these days, it's a national success story. America's homicide rate hit almost 10 per 100,000 in the peak years; it's now about half that. But not for black men. Black men are dying, overwhelmingly by gunshot, at a horrendous pace. In 2005, black men aged eighteen to twenty- four were murdered at a rate of 102 per 100,000 (white men of the same age: 12.2 per 100,000). Recent data show that, even as homicide overall continues to decline, black men are dying more. Between 2000 and 2007, the gun homicide rate for black men aged fourteen to seventeen went up 40 percent; eighteen to twenty-four, up 18 percent; twenty-five and over, up almost 27 percent. ...

"To us, [the real cause of this increase in violence, which we first started to learn from Boston policeman Paul Joyce and his colleagues in 1995] was a revelation. And it was completely, utterly different from what all the other outsiders thought. The youth violence epidemic was the biggest crime problem in the country, was getting an enormous amount of attention, was generating lots of action and opinion and research. On the conservative side, John Dilulio had coined the new word 'superpredator'; he, William Bennett, and John Walters would shortly publish Body Count, warning about 'the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.' Their diagnosis: a wave of 'radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters,' unleashed by a 'moral poverty,' to whom 'nothing else matters' but 'sex, drugs, money.' Their argument was completely circular and almost entirely without evidence. ... Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox [predicted] Armageddon. The 'superpredator' idea found tremendous traction nationally, leading to wholesale changes in state juvenile justice systems and laws about charging and trying juveniles as adults for violent crimes.

"On the liberal side, the favorite diagnosis was 'the increased availability of handguns,' leading to calls for new gun control. There was no evidence for this either. Our research was showing that access had always been so easy that there didn't have to be increased availability, just the new demand. An emerging 'public health' approach, championed by Harvard School of Public Health assistant dean Deborah Prothrow-Stith, found roots in, in addition to guns, violent popular culture, economic deprivation, the violent example of adults, and peer pressure. ...

"What all these ideas had in common, along with virtually all the rest of the public, policy, and political attention to the homicide epidemic, was the core conviction that the problem was huge, amorphous, and deeply rooted, and that it perforce needed a similarly huge response. ... The micro-dynamics of the violence were unintelligible - when it came to any particular shooting, it was practically obligatory to tack on 'senseless,' 'inexplicable,' 'irrational.'

"Nobody, anywhere, was saying what Paul Joyce and his people were:

"This is about a small number of very exceptional kids whose names we know doing things we understand pretty damn clearly. ...

[In Boston, the vast majority of the violence was committed by] sixty-one [gang] crews, with between 1,100 and 1,300 members, ... 1 percent of the right age group citywide. The killing was overwhelmingly not about money, drugs, markets, or anything economic. Over and over and over, it was about 'beefs' - standing vendettas between the groups. ... Very few of Boston's dead or Boston's killers, or the members of gangs, were legal juveniles - most of them were young adults, some a good deal older. ...

"[We ran a] Massachusetts criminal history on the dead and the known killers. The results were astounding. Of the 155 victims, 117 - 75 percent - had criminal records, 29 had been locked up, 65 had been on probation, 22 were on probation when they were killed. Those with records had, collectively, been charged with an average of 9.5 offenses apiece. ... Of the 125 known killers, 96 - 77 percent - had criminal records at the time they committed their homicides. ... All the gang turf put together was less than 4 percent of the city; it generated nearly a quarter of Boston's serious crime.

"So, for all practical purposes, this was Boston's youth violence problem: a few score groups, already well known, made up of shockingly active offenders, many of them already well known, hurting each other along already very well-known vectors of group vendetta. It wasn't even all of the gang members; the strike force officers made a distinction between what they led 'impact players' - gang members who were really into it, made things happen, shooters - and everybody else. There weren't a lot of impact players, they thought. Out of a crew of twenty, it's maybe two real players, Tracy said, making money, pulling triggers. Otherwise it's followers, they're scared, wannabes."

delanceyplace.com 11/8/11 - five hundred jews were crucified each day

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in 70 CE, just a few decades after the itinerant preachings of Jesus of Nazareth and after the Jews had rebelled against Roman rule, the Romans laid siege and destroyed the city of Jerusalem and its glorious temple, casting the Jews of that land into a global diaspora that did not see an end until the 20th century:

"On the 8th of the Jewish month of Ab, in late July AD 70, Titus, the Roman Emperor Vespasian's son who was in command of the four-month siege of Jerusalem, ordered his entire army to prepare to storm the Temple at dawn. The next day happened to be the very day on which Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem over 500 years before. Now, Titus commanded an army of four legions - a total of 60,000 Roman legionaries and local auxiliaries who were eager to deliver the final blow to the defiant but broken city. Within the walls, perhaps half a million starving Jews survived in diabolical conditions: some were fanatical religious zealots, some were freebooting bandits, but most were innocent families with no escape from this magnificent death-trap. There were many Jews living outside Judaea - they were to be found throughout the Mediterranean and Near East - and this final desperate struggle would decide not only the fate of the city and her inhabitants, but also the future of Judaism and the small Jewish cult of Christianity - and even, looking forward across six centuries, the shape of Islam.

"The Romans had built ramps up against the walls of the Temple. But their assaults had failed. Earlier that day, Titus told his generals that his efforts to preserve this 'foreign temple' were costing him too many soldiers and he ordered the Temple gates set alight. The silver of the gates melted and spread the fire to the wooden doorways and windows, thence to the wooden fittings in the passageways of the Temple itself. Titus ordered the fire to be quenched. The Romans, he declared, should 'not avenge themselves on inanimate objects instead of men.' Then he retired for the night into his headquarters in the half-ruined Tower of Antonia overlooking the resplendent Temple complex.

"Around the walls, there were gruesome scenes that must have resembled hell on earth. Thousands of bodies putrefied in the sun. The stench was unbearable. Packs of dogs and jackals feasted on human flesh. In the preceding months, Titus had ordered all prisoners or defectors to be crucified. Five hundred Jews were crucified each day. The Mount of Olives and the craggy hills around the city were so crowded with crucifixes that there was scarcely room for any more, nor trees to make them. Titus' soldiers amused themselves by nailing their victims splayed and spread-eagled in absurd positions. So desperate were many Jerusalemites to escape the city that, as they left, they swallowed their coins, to conceal their treasure, which they hoped to retrieve when they were safely clear of the Romans. They emerged 'puffed up with famine and swelled like men with dropsy,' but if they ate they 'burst asunder.' As their bellies exploded, the soldiers discovered their reeking intestinal treasure troves, so they started to gut all prisoners, eviscerating them and searching their intestines while they were still alive. But Titus was appalled and tried to ban these anatomical plunderings. To no avail: Titus' Syrian auxiliaries, who hated and were hated by the Jews with all the malice of neighbours, relished these macabre games. ...

"Prisoners and defectors brought news from within the city that especially upset [the historian] Josephus, whose own parents were trapped inside. Even the fighters started to run out of food, so they too probed and dissected the quick and the dead, for gold, for crumbs, for mere seeds, 'stumbling and staggering like mad dogs.' They ate cow dung, leather, girdles, shoes and old hay. A rich woman named Mary, having lost all her money and food, became so demented that she killed her own son and roasted him, eating half and keeping the rest for later. The delicious aroma crept across the city. The rebels savoured it, sought it and smashed into the house, but even those practised hatchetmen, on seeing the child's half-eaten body, 'went out trembling.' "

delanceyplace.com 11/7/11 - beware of greece

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:14:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Greece is a country at the heart of the current European financial crisis. The country had entered the European Union under the administration by manipulating its financial data so that it appeared to conform to the European Union's exacting financial requirements. It had then kept the truth about its debt and deficits from the EU until a scandal brought down the administration of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis in 2009 and incoming prime minister George Papandreou and his administration quickly discovered the catastrophic depths of their country's financial problems:

"The long-term picture was ... bleak. In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. 'Our people went in and couldn't believe what they found,' a senior IMF official told me, not long after he'd returned from the IMF's first Greek mission. 'The way they were keeping track of their finances - they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn't even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a third world country.'...

"In just the past twelve years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms - and that number doesn't take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece's rail passengers into taxicabs: it's still true. 'We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,' Manos put it to me. 'And yet there isn't a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.' The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland's. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something.

"There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as 'arduous' is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average - and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets."

delanceyplace.com 11/4/11 - iceland people melt

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the darkest days of our current financial crisis (which seems to be entering its second act in Europe), no country suffered a more spectacular collapse than tiny Iceland with its 300,000 citizens:

"In 2003, Iceland's three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years the banking assets grew to over $140 billion and were so much greater than Iceland's GDP that it made no sense to calculate the percentage of it they accounted for. It was, as one economist put it to me, 'the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind.'

"At the same time, in part because the banks were also lending Icelanders money to buy stocks and real estate, the value of Icelandic stocks and real estate went through the roof. From 2003 to 2007, while the value of the U.S. stock market was doubling, the value of the Icelandic stock market multiplied nine times. Reykjavik real estate prices tripled. In 2006 the average Icelandic family was three times as wealthy as the average Icelandic family had been in 2003, and virtually all of this new wealth was, in one way or another, tied to the new investment banking industry.

" 'Everyone was learning Black-Scholes' (the stock option-pricing model), says Ragnar Arnason, a professor of fishing economics at the University of Iceland, who watched students flee the economics of fishing for the economics of money. 'The schools of engineering and math were offering courses on finan- cial engineering. We had hundreds and hundreds of people studying finance.' This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn't have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously. (March 2006 Bloomberg News headline: ICELAND'S BILLIONAIRE TYCOON 'THOR' BRAVES U.S. WITH HEDGE FUND.)

"Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, Iceland's 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion in banking losses - which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculation, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland's financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended upon the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the government. But it was a lot.

"Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, "Well, at least we didn't do that" In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their GDP. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.)"

delanceyplace.com 11/3/11 - fear and children

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - in 1890, eighty percent of New York City's population was either foreign-born or of foreign parentage. Joseph Pulitzer, an immigrant himself, bought an also-ran New York World newspaper and transformed it into the most widely read and influential paper in the world by using sensational headlines and short sentences to attract this audience:

"The paper abandoned its old, dull headlines. In place of BENCH SHOW OF DOGS: PRIZES AWARDED ON THE SECOND DAY OF THE MEETING IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN on May 10, came SCREAMING FOR MERCY, HOW THE CRAVEN CORNETTI MOUNTED THE SCAFFOLD on May 12. Two weeks later the World's readers were greeted with BAPTIZED IN BLOOD, on top of a story, complete with a diagram, on how eleven people were crushed to death in a human stampede when panic broke out in a large crowd enjoying a Sunday stroll on the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge. In a city where half a dozen newspapers offered dull, similar fare to readers each morning, Pulitzer's dramatic headlines made the World stand out like a racehorse among draft horses.

"If the headline was the lure, the copy was the hook. Pulitzer could write all the catchy headlines he wanted, but it was up to the reporters to win over readers. He pushed his staff to give him simplicity and color. He admonished them to write in a buoyant, colloquial style comprising simple nouns, bright verbs, and short, punchy sentences. If there was a 'Pulitzer formula,' it was a story written so simply that anyone could read it and so colorfully that no one would forget it. The question 'Did you see that in the World?' Pulitzer instructed his staff, should be asked every day and something should be designed to cause this.

"Pulitzer had an uncanny ability to recognize news in what others ignored. He sent out his reporters to mine the urban dramas that other papers confined to their back pages. They returned with stories that could leave no reader unmoved. Typical, for instance, was the World's front-page tale, which ran soon after Pulitzer took over, of the destitute and widowed Margaret Graham. She had been seen by dockworkers as she walked on the edge of a pier in the East River with an infant in her arms and a two-year-old girl clutching her skirt. 'All at once the famished mother clasped the feeble little girl round her waist and, tottering to the brink of the wharf, hurled both her starving young into the river as it whirled by. She stood for a moment on the edge of the stream. The children were too weak and spent to struggle or to cry. Their little helpless heads dotted the brown tide for an instant, then they sank out of sight. The men who looked on stood spellbound.' Graham followed her children into the river but was saved by the onlookers and was taken to jail to face murder charges.

"For Pulitzer, a news story was always a story. He pushed his writers to think like Dickens, who wove fiction from the sad tales of urban Victorian London, to create compelling entertainment from the drama of the modern city. To the upper classes, it was sensationalism. To the lower and working classes, it was their life. When they looked at the World, they found stories about their world.

"In the Lower East Side's notorious bars, known as black and tans, or at dinner in their cramped tenements, men and women did not discuss society news, cultural events, or happenings in the investment houses. Rather, the talk was about the baby who fell to his death from a roof-top, the brutal beating that police officers dispensed to an unfortunate waif, or the rising cost of streetcar fares to the upper reaches of Fifth Avenue and the mansions needing servants. The clear, simple prose of the World drew in these readers, many of whom were immigrants struggling to master their first words of English. Writing about the events that mattered in their lives in a way they could understand, Putitzer's World gave these New Yorkers a sense of belonging and a sense of value. In one stroke, he simultaneously elevated the common man and took his spare change to fuel the World's profits. ...

"Pulitzer found readers where other newspaper publishers saw a threat. Immigrants were pouring into New York at a rate never before seen. By the end of the decade, eighty percent of the city's population was either foreign-born or of foreign parentage. Only the World seemed to consider the stories of this human tide as deserving news coverage, The other papers wrote about it; the World wrote for it."

delanceyplace.com 11/2/11 - scheherazade lives

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, told one thousand and one tales to the king to stave off her own execution:

"You have surely heard of the tales of Scheherazade known as One Thousand and One Nights or, simply, The Arabian Nights. The fifth [Muslim] Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid, appears in some of these tales, many of which take place in Baghdad during its golden age.

"The work as it exists today was collected over many centuries, and in addition to stories from the caliphate era, it includes tales that can be traced back to the folklore of Persia, India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The framing story of Scheherazade was probably drawn from a Persian work, which itself incorp- orated Indian influences.

"The oldest Arabic manuscript of One Thousand and One Nights that we know of dates from the fourteenth century, though scholars generally agree that the story was created around the ninth. The first European version appeared in the early eighteenth century, translated into French by Antoine Galland from an Arabic text, but it included a number of stories not in the original manuscript - including some of our favorites today: 'Aladdin's Lamp,' 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,' and 'The Seven Voyages of Sinbad.' Although different versions of the book include different tales, what they have in common is the framing story, which can be synopsized as follows.

"A Persian king, Shahryar, discovers evidence that his new bride has been unfaithful to him. In his anger, he has her executed and declares all women to be unfaithful creatures. He begins to marry a succession of virgins, only to execute each one the morning after their wedding night. Eventually, the king's vizier cannot find any more virgins in the kingdom - but the vizier's own daughter, Scheherazade, offers herself, and her father reluctantly agrees.

"On the night of her marriage to the king, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a story, but she doesn't end it - forcing him to postpone her execution so that he might hear how the fascinating tale concludes. The next night, she imparts the ending - but begins a new story, forcing the king to postpone her execution yet again. This continues for 1,001 nights.

"The stories included in the volume are meant to represent the various tales told by Scheherazade to the king. Some editions contain only a few hundred 'nights,' while others compile a full 1,001 stories. They include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, horror tales - even erotica. Many depict djinns (genies), magicians, and fantastic places, intermingled with real people and geography. Within this rich collection can be found early crime fiction, science fiction, and satire, along with many tales that hinge on fate, destiny, and coincidence. ...

"But what of Scheherazade? Different versions of One Thousand and One Nights have different endings. In some, Scheherazade asks for a pardon; in some, the king decides not to execute her out of love for their children; and in others, something happens to distract the king from his plan - but they all end with her life being spared. In the world of this influential and immensely enjoyable book, a great story well told is as important as life or death."

delanceyplace.com 11/1/11 - 96 Percent of the Universe is Missing

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - astronomers and physicists are now grappling with evidence that suggests that all the things we can observe in the universe with even the most powerful telescopes is only four percent of what is there. The rest, they posit, is dark matter and dark energy:

"In 1610 Galileo announced to the world that by observing the heavens through a new instrument - what we would call a telescope - he had discovered that the universe consists of more than meets the eye. The five hundred copies of the pamphlet announcing his results sold out immediately; when a package containing a copy arrived in Florence, a crowd quickly gathered around the recipient and demanded to hear every word. For as long as members of our species had been lying on our backs, looking up at the night sky, we had assumed that what we saw was all there was. But then Galileo found mountains on the Moon, satellites of Jupiter, hundreds of stars. Suddenly we had a new universe to explore, one to which astronomers would add, over the next four centuries, new moons around other planets, new planets around our Sun, hundreds of planets around other stars, a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond our own.

"By the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, astronomers had concluded that even this extravagant census of the universe might be as out-of-date as the five-planet cosmos that Galileo inherited from the ancients. The new universe consists of only a minuscule fraction of what we had always assumed it did - the material that makes up you and me and my laptop and all those moons and planets and stars and galaxies. The rest - the overwhelming majority of the universe - is ... who knows?

" 'Dark,' cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not 'dark' as in distant or invisible. This is not "dark" as in black holes or deep space. This is 'dark' as in unknown for now, and possibly forever: 23 percent something mysterious that they call dark matter, 73 percent something even more mysterious that they call dark energy. Which leaves only 4 percent the stuff of us. As one theorist likes to say at public lectures, 'We're just a bit of pollution.' Get rid of us and of everything else we've ever thought of as the universe, and very little would change. 'We're completely irrelevant,' he adds, cheerfully.

"The 'ultimate Copernican revolution,' as [astronomers] often call it, is taking place right now. It's happening in underground mines, where ultrasensitive detectors wait for the ping of a hypothetical particle that might already have arrived or might never come, and it's happening in ivory towers, where coffee-break conversations conjure multiverses out of espresso steam. It's happening at the South Pole, where telescopes monitor the relic radiation from the Big Bang; in Stockholm, where Nobelists have already begun to receive recognition for their encounters with the dark side; on the laptops of postdocs around the world, as they observe the realtime self-annihilations of stars, billions of light-years distant, from the comfort of a living room couch. It's happening in healthy collaborations and, the universe being the intrinsically Darwinian place it is, in career-threatening competitions.

"The astronomers who have found themselves leading this revolution didn't set out to do so. Like Galileo, they had no reason to expect that they would discover new phenomena. They weren't looking for dark matter. They weren't looking for dark energy. And when they found the evidence for dark matter and dark energy, they didn't believe it. But as more and better evidence accumulated, they and their peers reached a consensus that the universe we thought we knew, for as long as civilization had been looking at the night sky, is only a shadow of what's out there. That we have been blind to the actual universe because it consists of less than meets the eye. And that that universe is our universe - one we are only beginning to explore.

"It's 1610 all over again."

delanceyplace.com 10/31/11 - fear and children

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:43:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - on All Hallows Eve, better known as Halloween, we would note that children - those not too many steps removed from infancy and just past Winnie the Pooh - remember Halloween and forget that All Hallows Day (All Saints' Day) follows. And so - as with the killing of Bambi's mother by hunters, or the mother who wants to abandon her children in Hansel and Gretel - the most enduring children's stories feature fear, death, or scandalous characters, the very things that parents would guard them against. Thus Peter Pan has endured - the demon boy who stole children in the night, changed sides in a fight, and killed without conscience:

"Peter Pan opened at the Duke of York's Theatre on 27 December 1904, the day after Boxing Day, having been postponed due to difficulties with the flying equipment. Three days later Sir William Nicholson, who designed the costumes, reported: 'It is a huge success - biggest bookings they've ever known.'

"Judging by early fan letters, there was more of an interest in Wendy than Peter, with a number of 6- to 9-year-olds wanting to marry her. The part of Wendy was taken by Mary Ansell's friend Hilda Trevelyan and the consensus was that she 'acted the best'. Kenneth Morrisson pleaded: 'Please write and tell me whether your love for Peter Pan is real, I should so love to know.' ...

"The fact that here was a demon boy who not only has no love in him, but steals children from their beds in the night, changes sides in a fight, and kills without conscience, was ignored. It was not in the nature of the production that anyone should notice.

"The play underwent constant revision from the moment of its first rehearsal. Captain Hook was almost nowhere to be seen initially. It was only after Gerald du Maurier, who played both Mr Darling and Hook, made such a good job of the pirate that Hook assumed a large presence on stage, eventually to command a whole Act of his own. But that of course meant that when Peter defeated him, the demon boy was taken to be a terrific goody. ...

"Lost was any interest in why the author should have chosen the name Pan, after the goat-foot god of Greek myth, who was abandoned by his mother as a child and appeared to Faust with his pipes and Dionysian maenads - 'the Wild-folk', who 'know what no man else doth guess'. Pan is also of course the origin of the European Pied Piper myth, in which all the children of Hamelin are stolen from their homes and led into the mountain. It would be some time before biographers dug out of Jim's [author J.M. Barrie] original notes for the play that Peter was marked out as 'a demon boy, villain of the story'. ...

"In the house of Mr and Mrs Darling ... there never was a simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan.

"Peter had seen many tragedies, but he had forgotten them all ... 'I forget [people] after I kill them.' "

delanceyplace.com 10/28/11 - the leonard-duran pre-fight press conference

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1980, Sugar Ray Leonard - the All-American Golden Boy, the Olympic Gold Medalist - had his first fight against Panamanian Roberto Duran, the most feared fighter of his generation. It was the biggest sporting event of its day, and American hearts were broken when Leonard lost. As he confesses in his autobiography, in some respects the fight was lost at the first promotional pre-fight press conference when Leonard found himself caught offguard. When Duran taunted him, instead of opting for either enlightened disregard or an energized counterattack, he found himself trapped in the uncertain and unprepared in-between:

"The first occasion where Duran and I spent any real time together was at the April press conference to officially announce our fight. It was staged at the glamorous Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan. The top boxing writers were in attendance, geared up to begin promoting what promised to be the biggest fight since [Muhammad] Ali vs. [Joe] Frazier III five years earlier.

"I looked forward to these gatherings. They gave me a chance to mingle with reporters I respected and show off my superior communication skills. I also saw an opportunity, as Ali did, to get inside my opponent's head, to win the fight before the fight. I won every time.

"Well, not every time.

"Early in the proceedings, Duran jabbed me softly with an oversized glove that's commonly used for promotional purposes. The photographers ate it up. For a while, I went along with the unrehearsed bit, anything for the show. Except Duran didn't know when to stop fooling around. Or he kept going just to irritate me. Either way, the playful taps got harder and harder. I gave him an angry glance. It did no good and was probably the dumbest thing I could have done. He saw that he was getting under my skin and now he would never shut up.

"He called me a 'motherf****r' and a 'son of a b***h' and a 'marica' (Spanish for 'homosexual') and told me to kiss his b***s. No one had ever spoken to me like that, not even in the hood. For the longest time I stood there like a statue, though it ran counter to every impulse in my body. I should have insulted him back and put my head squarely in his face. It was not as if I didn't know the language of the gutter as thoroughly as he did. But with Mike Trainer's man- tra - 'always smile for the cameras' - echoing in my ears, I was the perfect gentleman, until I could take the abuse no longer.

"I told the press I would 'kill' Duran in ]une. The words were out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying. I was never so cocky before a fight, and because it wasn't my natural behavior, I didn't hit the proper notes. I came across more frightened than fearless.

"The trick to Ali's prefight bragging, besides the fact that he usually backed it up, was how he injected humor into each situation with his silly playacting and clever rhyming. He could make the most outrageous predictions and say the most demeaning things about the proud warriors he fought and somehow seem endearing.

"There was nothing endearing about me on that day at the Waldorf. Round one went to Duran."

delanceyplace.com 10/27/11 - jamestown was a way to get to china

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - England's motivation in establishing colonies such as Jamestown was commercial, in large part to find a river route through North America to the Pacific Ocean and China. Englishmen invested vast sums in Jamestown and other colonies in search of huge payoffs from trade with the Orient:

"[Sir Thomas] Smythe was leading the effort to reorganize the struggling Jamestown venture under a new royal charter. Smythe would serve as the treasurer of (the de facto governor) this 'second' Virginia Company when it was chartered in May 1609. The Virginia venture would send out an unprecedented nine-vessel relief flotilla to Jamestown that summer and it evidently was consuming the lion's share of available capital [in London]. ...

"With more than six hundred active investors the [Virginia] company's objectives were so multifold that there were heated disagreements on priorities: Establish a profitable plantation? Find a passage through the continent to the Orient? Secure cargoes of medicinal herbs? Seek out rumored mineral riches especially gold? ...

"As strange as it might seem to us today the idea of reaching China by cutting through the heart of North America was a powerfully persuasive idea [at that] time which owed its currency to arguments made in a little book that had recently been a bestseller. It was a publishing phenomenon ... called A Briefe and True Relation of the Discoverie of the North Part of Virginia ... and the author was John Brereton.

"The volume was inflated with content meant to lure investors to the cause of exploration and colonization. ... A key component was a treatise by Edward Hayes on colonization and exploration. ... Inspired by the river systems of Europe and western Asia, Hayes proposed that there must be also great rivers in North America draining not only eastward into the Atlantic but also westward into the Pacific within the temperate zone. The midcontinental gap between the headwaters of these as yet undiscovered rivers he imagined to be perhaps one hundred leagues or three hundred miles. Goods could be transported overland between them by horses mules or 'beasts of that country apt to labour' such as elk or buffalo or 'by the aid of many Savages accustomed to burdens; who shall stead us greatly in these affairs.'

"Hayes argued that a route to the Orient could be found through the continent of North America instead of above it. ... He also believed that colonization was a precursor to making a passage search. ... His passage-making premise was at the core of English designs on eastern North America. Both the Jamestown and Kennebec colonies of the original Virginia Company were sited with the idea of exploiting a river course that met Hayes's transcontinental criteria and much of the initial energy at Jamestown was devoted to investigating such a route initially on the river James.

" 'When it shall please God to send you on the coast of Virginia' the first flotilla of the London wing of the Virginia Company was instructed by its backers in 1606 'you shall do your best endeavour to find out a safe port in the entrance of some navigable river making choice of such a one as runneth farthest into the land.' And if they discovered several suitable rivers among which one had two main branches 'if the difference be not great make choice of that which bendeth most toward the Northwest for that way you shall soonest find the other sea.'

"This 'other sea' was the South Sea, the East India Sea, the 'Back' Sea: the Pacific Ocean."

delanceyplace.com 10/26/11 - the british who loved napoleon

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - not all of the British were against the idea of American independence in 1776 - especially those who favored the end of the British monarchy. And not all of the British were against Napoleon when he came to power in the 1790s - even though he invaded much of Europe and brought war against Britain that only ended in the Battle of Waterloo. In fact, in the early days of Napoleon's reign, some of the British considered Napoleon to be "the French George Washington":

"E.Tangye Lean's book The Napoleonists describes in absorbing detail the way politicians of the Whig opposition and the leading writers and journalists of the period created an image of Napoleon as a man of destiny, the agent of progressive change in the world. He was presented as everything that the reactionary Tories were not. Those in the habit of excusing and praising Napoleon took such pride in renouncing patriotism that they were perceived as agents of a mortal enemy, indeed traitors. Lord Holland might have been a Whig prime minister. He considered Napoleon 'the greatest statesman and the ablest general of ancient or modern times.' ...

"Charles James Fox, Lord Holland's uncle, was as quick to excuse and flatter Napoleon as he had been to hail the French Revolution. Here was the George Washington of France, a moderate man as well. In no circumstances would Napoleon seize power by force, and when he did so, Fox whitewashed it as the kind of reorganization of the state that military men are apt to go in for. Napoleon had made good the past, Fox told Lord Holland, he had 'thrown a splendour even over the violence of the Revolution.' After the Treaty of Amiens, Fox declared, "the Triumph of the French government over the English does in fact afford me a degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise.' ...

"1814 was the crucial year whose series of battles forced Napoleon to abdicate. Already notorious, [the famous poet Lord] Byron was a foremost spokesman for those who glorified Napoleon as a superman redesigning the world on progressive lines. That January he told his long-suffering publisher John Murray that Napoleon 'has my best wishes to manure the fields of France with an invading army,' a jaunty way of expressing his contempt for British purposes and British soldiers. Next month, he was writing, 'Napoleon! This week will decide his fate. All seems against him; but I believe and hope he will win.' That April, Paris capitulated. 'I mark this day!' Byron commented on hearing the news, 'I am utterly bewildered and confounded.' Immediately, in a matter of hours and in a spirit of distress at events, he wrote the ten stanzas of his 'Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte.' ...

"Exile to the island of Elba seemed to Napoleon's admirers an ending too inglorious to be tolerated. Whig politicians, Lord John Russell among them, visited Elba to pay their respects as though to an Emperor in a miniature court. Napoleon's escape from captivity thrilled them. Byron exulted, 'It is impossible not to be dazzled and overwhelmed by his character and career.' "

delanceyplace.com 10/25/11 - how to make silk

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - silk making was so critical to the wealth and power of China that extreme measures were taken to guard its secrets, and it was a capital crime to spread those secrets beyond the imperial domain. The moths used to make the finest quality silk are blind, flightless, and can only live in captivity:

"Today's methods [of making silk] are not all that different from those pioneered by artisans thousands of years ago. It all begins with the cultivation of silkworms - a little white caterpillar. ... For thousands of years, silk farmers, first in China and then around the world, have raised silkworms and harvested their silk.

"Both wild and domesticated silk moths produce silk, but the best-quality filaments come from the domesticated silkworm moth, Bombyx mori. Descended from a species native to China, these silk moths are helpless: they are blind, flightless, and can only live in captivity.

"[After] adult silk moths mate, the female soon lays about five hundred tiny eggs - and then she dies. After about ten to twelve days, a minuscule caterpillar hatches out of each egg. The little caterpillars grow quickly as they feed on mulberry leaves, multiplying their weight 10,000 times in only one month. As a result, they continually 'outgrow' their whitish gray skin and shed it three or four times before they reach full size.

"The mature caterpillar soon spins a silk cocoon around itself and, once safely inside, begins its transformation into a pupa. If left to its own devices, the pupa emerges from its cocoon as a moth and begins the life cycle all over again. In silk cultivation, however, the farmers interrupt the natural cycle by collecting the cocoons before the moths are ready to hatch. They unwind the cocoons into silk threads, which are then woven into cloth. ...

"The natural history of silk is interesting in its simplicity. The silk moth is a unique insect because it cannot survive outside of human husbandry. Left alone to the wilds, even in delicate temperate climates, the moths and their caterpillars will die if exposed to the natural elements. They are also extremely susceptible to changes in temperature and humidity. People who raise silkworms traditionally don't like visitors and don't cook heavily scented foods or even smoke cigarettes in their homes. The doors of their houses are usually posted with paper signs announcing when the worms are in a fragile stage.

"After a silkworm spins its cocoon over the course of two to three days, the cocoons are harvested. Only a few moths are allowed to emerge and reproduce to provide the next generation. The individual cocoons are processed by immersion in scalding water, killing the metamorphosing moth and relaxing the single silk thread that comprises the entire cocoon so it can be drawn from the boiling water.

"Silk itself is a complex protein, which when secreted is triangular in cross section. This structure causes reflected light to be broken up, giving silk its unique shimmering property. Each cocoon can provide about a mile-long silk filament; however, it is so fine that it takes up to five hundred cocoons to make a six-ounce silk robe. Although other kinds of "silk" from different species of moths (and even spiders) have been used to make fabrics, practically all silk fabric ever produced comes from this single domestic species."

delanceyplace.com 10/24/11 - violence is declining

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, author
Stephen Pinker discusses the reasons for the decline in societal violence. He starts by demonstrating the precipitous decline in violent death rates after the introduction of states, and the continued decline into the 21st century:"

[Examining] the remains of hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas ... from 14,000 BCE to 1770 CE, in every case well before the emergence of state societies or the first sustained contact with them, [shows that their violent] death rates range from o to 60 percent, with an average of 15 percent.

"Next [we examine] figures from eight contemporary or recent societies that make their living primarily from hunting and gathering. They come from the Americas, the Philippines, and Australia. The average of the rates of death by warfare is within a whisker of the average estimated from the bones: 14 percent, with a range from 4 percent to 30 percent.

"In the next cluster I've lumped pre-state societies that engage in some mixture of hunting, gathering, and horticulture. All are from New Guinea or the Amazon rain forest, except Europe's last tribal society, the Montenegrins, whose rate of violent death is close to the average for the group as a whole, 24.5 percent.

"Finally we get to some figures for states. The earliest are from the cities and empires of pre-Columbian Mexico, in which 5 percent of the dead were killed by other people. That was undoubtedly a dangerous place, but it was a third to a fifth as violent as an average pre-state society. When it comes to modern states, we are faced with hundreds of political units, dozens of centuries, and many subcategories of violence to choose from (wars, homicides, genocides, and so on), so there is no single 'correct' estimate. But we can make the comparison as fair as possible by choosing the most violent countries and centuries, together with some estimates of violence in the world today. As we shall see in chapter 5, the two most violent centuries in the past half millennium of European history were the 17th, with its bloody Wars of Religion, and the 20th, with its two world wars. The historian Quincy Wright has estimated the rate of death in the wars of the 17th century at 2 percent, and the rate of death in war for the first half of the 20th at 3 percent. If one were to include the last four decades of the 20th century, the percentage would be even lower. One estimate, which includes American war deaths as well, comes in at less than l percent.

"Recently the study of war has been made more precise by the release of two quantitative datasets, which I will explain in chapter 5. They conservatively list about 40 million battle deaths during the 20th century. ('Battle deaths' refer to soldiers and civilians who were directly killed in combat.) If we consider that a bit more than 6 billion people died during the 20th century, and put aside some demographic subtleties, we may estimate that around 0.7 percent of the world's population died in battles during that century. Even if we tripled or quadrupled the estimate to include indirect deaths from war-caused famine and disease, it would barely narrow the gap between state and nonstate societies. What if we added the deaths from genocides, purges, and other man-made disasters? Matthew White, the atrocitologist we met in chapter 1, estimates that around 180 million deaths can be blamed on all of these human causes put together. That still amounts to only 3 percent of the deaths in the 20th century.

"Now let's turn to the present. According to the most recent edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2,448,017 Americans died in 2005. It was one of the country's worst years for war deaths in decades, with the armed forces embroiled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together the two wars killed 945 Americans, amounting to 0.0004 (four-hundredths of a percent) of American deaths that year. Even if we throw in the 18,124 domestic homicides, the total rate of violent death adds up to 0.008, or eight-tenths of a percentage point. In other Western countries, the rates were even lower. And in the world as a whole, the Human Security Report Project counted 17,400 deaths that year that were directly caused by political violence (war, terrorism, genocide, and killings by warlords and militias), for a rate of 0.0003 (three-hundredths of a percent). It's a conservative estimate, comprising only identifiable deaths, but even if we generously multiplied it by twenty to estimate undocumented battle deaths and indirect deaths from famine and disease, it would not reach the 1 percent mark."

delanceyplace.com 10/21/11 - can we live forever?

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:23:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - some researchers believe we will soon be able to reverse the process of aging:

"An energetic and insightful advocate of stopping the aging process by chang- ing the information processes underlying biology is Aubrey de Grey, a scientist in the department of genetics at Cambridge University. De Grey uses the metaphor of maintaining a house. How long does a house last? The answer obviously depends on how well you take care of it. If you do nothing, the roof will spring a leak before long, water and the elements will invade, and eventually the house will disintegrate. But if you proactively take care of the structure, repair all damage, confront all dangers, and rebuild or renovate parts from time to time using new materials and technologies, the life of the house can essentially be extended without limit.

"The same holds true for our bodies and brains. The only difference is that, while we fully understand the methods underlying the maintenance of a house, we do not yet fully understand all of the biological principles of life. But with our rapidly increasing comprehension of the biochemical processes and pathways of biology, we are quickly gaining that knowledge. We are beginning to understand aging, not as a single inexorable progression but as a group of related processes. Strategies are emerging for fully reversing each of these aging progressions, using different combinations of biotechnology techniques.

"De Grey describes his goal as 'engineered negligible senescence' - stopping the body and brain from becoming more frail and disease-prone as it grows older. As he explains, 'All the core knowledge needed to develop engineered negligible senescence is already in our possession - it mainly just needs to be pieced together.' De Grey believes we'll demonstrate 'robustly rejuvenated' mice - mice that are functionally younger than before being treated and with the life extension to prove it - within ten years, and he points out that this achievement will have a dramatic effect on public opinion. Demonstrating that we can reverse the aging process in an animal that shares 99 percent of our genes will profoundly challenge the common wisdom that aging and death are inevitable. Once robust rejuvenation is confirmed in an animal, there will be enormous competitive pressure to translate these results into human therapies, which should appear five to ten years later."

delanceyplace.com 10/20/11 - loneliness and dawn

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - throughout his life Frank Sinatra dreaded being alone and so spent most nights surrounded by friends, insisting that they stay and often greeting the dawn with them:

"Frank Sinatra did not like to be alone. Alone, he was anxious, even a little fearful. ... And so, for only the lonely, he sang the rhetorical question: 'When you're alone, who cares for starlit skies?' Not him, that's who. When he was alone, night was a bitch, a black hole, a bitter void. Night required company, required fortification and reinforcements. Since the forties he would not take on the night, any night, single-handedly. So he marshaled troops to sit with him, to drink and to smoke and to laugh with him. 'The thing Frankie doesn't seem to understand is that the body's got to get some sleep,' a bedraggled friend complained four decades ago. At that moment, the New York Times declared: 'He fights a relentless battle against sleeping before sun-up.' Even in the sixties, messing around on his cockamamie two-way radio, he gave himself the handle 'Night Fighter.' ...

"He would break more dawns than most mortals. Each one was his triumph, the death of each night. He had survived yet another one. 'He feels reborn in the morning light,' his daughter Tina once attested. When horizons brightened, he exulted over the spoils of war. 'Look at the colors!' he would say, pointing bleary comrades toward thousands of sunrises. 'What kind of blue would you call that?' He called the tint of sky that offered him the most peace Five O'Clock Vegas Blue. ...

"Woe to those missing. More woe to those who greeted dawns by his side. It is there that scores of [his companions] slumped, trapped, for he insisted nobody leave. ... Begin to nod off, he would say 'Hey! What are you doing? Wake up!' Rise from the table he would say, 'Where the hell are you going?' Best excuse: 'To the bathroom.' 'Well that's all right then' Frank would allow, if suspiciously. ... But many who crept away were summoned back. 'God help you if he knew what room you were in' says [Hank] Cattaneo. 'Frank himself would light firecrackers under your door.'

" 'Frank is the only person I know who invites you to a black-tie party and, as he is hanging up the telephone, says 'Be sure to bring your sunglasses.' "

delanceyplace.com 10/19/11 - liquid bread

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Americans were heavy drinkers from the very beginning. During revolutionary times Americans drank quantities of hard liquor many times greater than today's Americans. In the late 1800s, however, America's preference in alcohol changed from spirits to beer - a change driven largely by the massive influx of immigrants. As always, these immigrants - German, Irish, Slav, Scandinavian, and many, many others - were denigrated and reviled as scum:

"By the end of the nineteenth century, production of whiskey and other distilled spirits had declined substantially, to a per capita figure not radically dissimilar from what it would be a full hundred years later.

"But this change in habit disguised the cold fact that something had come along to replace the rotgut, moonshine, grain alcohol, and all those other cheap elixirs, as potent as battery acid, that had been the basic stock of the down-at-heels saloon. ... In 1850 Americans drank 36 million gallons of beer; by 1890 annual consumption had exploded to 855 million gallons. During that four-decade span, while the population tripled, that population's capacity for beer had increased twenty-four-fold.

"There was nothing mysterious about this change. Immigration was responsible, of course, at first from Ireland and Germany. The Germans brought not only beer itself but a generation of men who knew how to make it, how to market it, and how to pretend it was something it was not. The four-year-old United States Brewers' Association declared in 1866 that hard liquor caused 'domestic misery, pauperism, disease and crime.' On the other hand, the brewers maintained, beer was "liquid bread."*

"It also was the substance that composed the ocean upon which a vast new armada of saloons was launched. As the cities filled with immigrants; as a similar settlement of the West accelerated, particularly in the predominantly male lumber camps and mining towns (the states in the Northwest, wrote historian John Higham, 'were competing with each other for Europeans to people their vacant lands and develop their economies'); and as a clever and worldly young brewer named Adolphus Busch figured out that pasteurization kept beer fresh enough to ship across the country on the newly completed transcontinental railroad, it became the national beverage.

"That the proliferation of saloons was abetted by immigrants (usually German or Bohemian), largely for immigrants (members of those nationalities, but also Irish, Slavs, Scandinavians, and many, many others), was not lost on the moralists of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and other temperance organizations. As early as 1876, [temperance leader] Frances Willard had referred in a speech to 'the infidel foreign population of our country.' Near the end of her career, Willard called on Congress to pass immigration restrictions to keep out 'the scum of the Old World.' In the Mesabi and Vermilion ranges of northern Minnesota, congressional investigators counted 256 saloons in fifteen mining towns, their owners representing eighteen distinct immigrant nationalities. 'If a new colony of foreigners appears' in Chicago, the muckraker George Kibbe Turner wrote in 1909, 'some compatriot is set at once to selling them liquor. Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians, Poles - all the rough and hairy tribes which have been drawn to Chicago - have their trade exploited to the utmost.' U.S. census figures indicated that 80 percent of licensed saloons were owned by first-generation Americans."

delanceyplace.com 10/18/11 - receiving, giving, and eskimos

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the supposedly virtuous act of giving is often instead an act meant to create an obligation, an act whereby the giver measures himself against the receiver and requires a repayment, even if that repayment is gratitude:

"[Here] are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer - an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat [for him]. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

" 'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. 'And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.'

"The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar state- ments about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began 'comparing power with power, measuring, calculating' and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt."

delanceyplace.com 10/17/11 - peanuts, charles schulz, and his mother

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - Charles Schulz, creator, author and illustrator of the cartoon strip Peanuts for nearly fifty years, which at its peak was read by over 300 million people. His most powerful memory - and his most powerful motivator - was the death of his mother:

"When called on to discuss his life, Charles 'Sparky' Schulz never began at the beginning, never with his birth on November 26, 1922 or his early years, but always with his mother's death on March 1, 1943, his own departure for the war and the merciless speed of it all: in that week, Dena Halverson Schulz had died on a Monday, she was buried Friday and by Saturday the army had taken him away. ...

"As early as his sophomore year in high school, Sparky had come home to a bedridden mother. Some evenings she had been too ill to put food on the table; some nights he had been awakened by her cries of pain. But no one spoke directly about the affliction; only Sparky's father and his mother's trusted sister Marion knew its source; they would not identify it as cancer in Sparky's presence until after it had reached its fourth and final stage - in November 1942, the same month he was drafted.

"On February 28, 1943, with a day pass from Fort Snelling, Sparky returned from his army barracks to his mother's bedside. ... She was turned away from him in her bed against the wall opposite the windows that overlooked the street. [Late that evening] he said he guessed it was time to go.

" 'Yes' she said, 'I suppose we should say good- bye.'

"She turned her gaze as best she could. 'Well,' she said 'good-bye, Sparky. We'll probably never see each other again.'

"Later, he said 'I'll never get over that scene as long as I live,' and indeed he could not down to his own dying day. It was certainly the worst night of his life, the night of 'my greatest tragedy' - which he repeatedly put into the terms of his passionate sense of unfulfillment that his mother 'never had the opportunity to see me get anything published.' "

delanceyplace.com 10/14/11 - kings forgive loans

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in ancient city-states such as Babylon, Sumeria and Judaea, rulers found it necessary to cancel all consumer debt from time to time to keep peasants from becoming permanent debt-peons and thus to keep society from being torn apart - a phenomenon all the more interesting from the perspective of our debt-laden 21st century:

"Mesopotamian city-states were dominated by vast Temples: gigantic, complex industrial institutions often staffed by thousands - including everyone from shepherds and barge-pullers to spinners and weavers to dancing girls and clerical administrators, [and these Temples owned many of the assets of the city-state]. ...

"We don't know precisely when and how interest-bearing loans originated, since they appear to predate writing. Most likely, Temple administrators invented the idea as a way of financing the caravan trade. This trade was crucial because while the river valley of ancient Mesopotamia was extraordinarily fertile and produced huge surpluses of grain and other foodstuffs, and supported enormous numbers of livestock, which in turn supported a vast wool and leather industry, it was almost completely lacking in anything else. Stone, wood, metal, even the silver used as money, all had to be imported. From quite early times, then, Temple administrators developed the habit of advancing goods to local merchants - some of them private, others themselves Temple functionaries - who would then go off and sell it overseas. Interest was just a way for the Temples to take their share of the resulting profits.

"However, once established, the principle seems to have quickly spread. Before long, we find not only commercial loans, but also consumer loans - usury in the classical sense of the term. By C2400 BC it already appears to have been common practice on the part of local officials, or wealthy merchants, to advance loans to peasants who were in financial trouble on collateral and begin to appropriate their possessions if they were unable to pay. It usually started with grain, sheep, goats, and furniture, then moved on to fields and houses, or, alternately or ultimately, family members. Servants, if any, went quickly, followed by children, wives, and in some extreme occasions, even the borrower himself. These would be reduced to debt-peons: not quite slaves, but very close to that, forced into perpetual service in the lender's household - or, sometimes, in the Temples or Palaces themselves. In theory, of course, any of them could be redeemed whenever the borrower repaid the money, but for obvious reasons, the more a peasant's resources were stripped away from him, the harder that became.

"The effects were such that they often threatened to rip society apart. If for any reason there was a bad harvest, large proportions of the peasantry would fall into debt peonage; families would be broken up. Before long, lands lay abandoned as indebted farmers fled their homes for fear of repossession and joined semi-nomadic bands on the desert fringes of urban civilization. Faced with the potential for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties: 'clean slates,' as economic historian Michael Hudson refers to them. Such decrees would typically declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void (commercial debts were not affected), return all land to its original owners, and allow all debt-peons to return to their families. Before long, it became more or less a regular habit for kings to make such a declaration on first assuming power, and many were forced to repeat it periodically over the course of their reigns.

"In Sumeria, these were called 'declarations of freedom.' - and it is significant that the Sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word for 'freedom' in any known human language, literally means 'return to mother' - since this is what freed debt-peons were finally allowed to do. ...

"Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we now consider Judaism.

"The problem was that Nehemiah quickly found himself confronted with a social crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were unable to pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of the poor. His first response was to issue a classic Babylonian- style 'clean slate' edict - having himself been born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven. Maximum interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, which in certain ways went even further, by institutionalizing the principle. The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled 'in the Sabbath year' (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.

"Freedom," in the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt."

delanceyplace.com 10/13/11 - mark twain, his mother, and slaves

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - Samuel Clemens attempted to write his autobiography over several decades but never finished, and instructed that the draft not be made available for 100 years. In manuscripts released last year, Clemens wrote of his early schoolboy friendships with black slaves in the 1840s, including slaves that appeared later as characters in his most famous fictional works:

"All the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. I say in effect, using the phrase as a modification. We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible. We had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and adviser in 'Uncle Dan'l,' a middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro-quarter, whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile. He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as 'Jim,' and carted him all around - to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon - and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling and this estimate have stood the test of sixty years and more and have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then.

"In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind - and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing. In Hannibal we seldom saw a slave misused; on the farm, never.

"There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years. We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing - it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and wouldn't she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this -

" 'Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child's noise would make you glad.'

"It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy's noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was capable with her tongue to the last - especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit. She has come handy to me several times in my books, where she figures as Tom Sawyer's 'Aunt Polly.' I fitted her out with a dialect, and tried to think up other improvements for her, but did not find any. I used Sandy once, also; it was in 'Tom Sawyer;' I tried to get him to whitewash the fence, but it did not work. I do not remember what name I called him by in the book."

delanceyplace.com 10/12/11 - sexual norms

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's exceprt - sexual norms have varied widely throughout history:

We cannot find distinct gay men or lesbians in the past because distant cultures had no conception of sexuality as an identity, as Michel Foucault, James Davidson and Giulia Sissa have shown (Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, Vintage, 1988). The ancient Greek man may have cruised the Acropolis looking for teenage boys, but he was just as happy to find a female slave - and he went home to his wife. It is tempting to imagine such past cultures as oases of toleration, when people didn't care who a man slept with. Tell that to Timarchus, deprived of his citizenship in ancient Athens for supposedly selling sex (James M. Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008; Giulia Sissa, Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World, Yale University Press, 2008).

Today we think of Islamic societies as sexually repressive and homophobic. But, unlike in early Christianity, sexual pleasure in early Islam was not seen as bad in itself, as long as a man just had sex with his own wives or slaves. Muslim authorities even excused coitus interruptus for the purposes of birth control. Sufi mystics adored the beauty of male youths, with their downy cheeks, as a pathway to adoring the beauty of God and some men adored young men for more sensuous reasons. At the same time the effeminate man who had sex with other men was scorned and stigmatised. During the 19th century western orientalists began to denigrate (or sometimes exoticise) Islamic societies for what they saw as a tolerance for homosexual relations. In response Persian and Arab intellectuals began to repudiate the heritage of male-male love. They were not just echoing government mandates or western experts, however. Rather, nationalists were demanding that their governments modernise society by supporting modern monogamous romantic marriage (Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, 2009; Afsaheh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, University of California Press, 2005).

The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault argued that Victorian sexual repression was a myth, that instead of a silence there was a proliferation of discourses about sex. Medical doctors, psychiatrists and sexologists obsessively categorised sexual variations. But Hera Cook argues that sexual repression was a reality. She does not see sexual desire as a natural force that was suppressed; rather, if sex was constructed, people had to learn about sex and, if the only messages they received were negative, sexual expression would be inhibited. In fact, she argues, abstinence was an important means of birth control just about until the invention of the pill. 'I have a headache tonight, dear', was a way middle-class women refused to have too many children (Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception 1800-1975, Oxford University Press, 2004).

Victorian sexual silence had its advantages for some - close female friendships were celebrated, even when women longed to kiss and hug each other all night - because society thought they weren't sexual. In fact, Sharon Marcus argues, intimate female friendships and even female partnerships bolstered conventional Victorian marriages (Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928, University of Chicago Press, 2004; Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Princeton University Press, 2007). But, as the recent BBC film The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister shows, some of these women were having passionately sexual relationships.

delanceyplace.com 10/11/11 - most great investment results come from going against the crowd

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - legendary investor Howard Marks contends that superior investment results can only come from going against the consensus. However, just because an investment is contrarian does not make it a good investment, it has to be the right contrarian investment - and contrarian investing is by definition a highly risky and lonely pursuit:

"There's only one way to describe most investors: trend followers. Superior investors are the exact opposite. Superior investing, as I hope I've convinced you by now, requires ... a way of thinking that's different from that of others, more complex and more insightful. By definition, most of the crowd can't share it. Thus, the judgments of the crowd can't hold the key to success. Rather, the trend, the consensus view, is something to game against, and the consensus portfolio is one to diverge from. As the pendulum swings or the market goes through its cycles, the key to ultimate success lies in doing the opposite. ...

"The thing I find most interesting about investing is how paradoxical it is: how often the things that seem most obvious - on which everyone agrees - turn out not to be true.

"What's clear to the broad consensus of investors is almost always wrong. ... The very coalescing of popular opinion behind an investment tends to elimi- nate its profit potential. ... Take, for example, the investment that 'everyone' believes to be a great idea. In my view by definition it simply cannot be so.

If everyone likes it, it's probably because it has been doing well. Most people seem to think outstanding performance to date presages out- standing future performance. Actually, it's more likely that outstanding performance to date has borrowed from the future and thus presages subpar performance from here on out
If everyone likes it, it's likely the price has risen to reflect a level of adulation from which relatively little further appreciation is likely.
If everyone likes it, there's significant risk that prices will fall if the crowd changes its collective mind and moves for the exit.

"Superior investors know - and buy - when the price of something is lower than it should be. And the price of an investment can be lower than it should be only when most people don't see its merit. Yogi Berra is famous for having said, 'Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore; it's too crowded.' It's just as non- sensical to say, 'Everyone realizes that investment's a bargain.' If everyone realizes it, they'll buy, in which case the price will no longer be low. ... Large amounts of money aren't made by buying what everybody likes. They're made by buying what everybody underestimates. ...

"In short, there are two primary elements in superior investing:

seeing some quality that others don't see or appreciate (and that isn't reflected in the price), and
having it turn out to be true (or at least accepted by the market).

"It should be clear from the first element that the process has to begin with investors who are unusually perceptive, unconventional, iconoclastic or early. That's why successful investors are said to spend a lot of their time being lonely."

delanceyplace.com 10/10/11 - the accelerating pace of change

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the view of esteemed inventor Ray Kurzweil, the pace of
technological change in our world is accelerating so rapidly that there will soon be no distinction between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality - and eventually our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits:

"Consider this parable: a lake owner wants to stay at home to tend to the lake's fish and make certain that the lake itself will not become covered with lily pads, which are said to double their number every few days. Month after month, he patiently waits, yet only tiny patches of lily pads can be discerned, and they don't seem to be expanding in any noticeable way. With the lily pads covering less than 1 percent of the lake, the owner figures that it's safe to take a vacation and leaves with his family. When he returns a few weeks later, he's shocked to discover that the entire lake has become covered with the pads, and his fish have perished. By doubling their number every few days, the last seven doublings were sufficient to extend the pads' coverage to the entire lake. (Seven doublings extended their reach 128-fold.) This is the nature of exponential growth.

"Consider Gary Kasparov, who scorned the pathetic state of computer chess in 1992. Yet the relentless doubling of computer power every year enabled a computer to defeat him only five years later. The list of ways computers can now exceed human capabilities is rapidly growing. Moreover, the once narrow applications of computer intelligence are gradually broadening in one type of activity after another. For example, computers are diagnosing electrocardio- grams and medical images, flying and landing airplanes, controlling the tactical decisions of automated weapons, making credit and financial decisions, and being given responsibility for many other tasks that used to require human intelligence. The performance of these systems is increasingly based on inte- grating multiple types of artificial intelligence (AI). But as long as there is an AI shortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as an inherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of our own creations. ...

"Although impressive in many respects, the human brain suffers from severe limitations. We use its massive parallelism (one hundred trillion interneuronal connections operating simultaneously) to quickly recognize subtle patterns. But our thinking is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. That makes our physiological bandwidth for processing new information extremely limited compared to the exponential growth of the overall human knowledge base. ...

"While human intelligence is sometimes capable of soaring in its creativity and expressiveness, much human thought is derivative, petty, and circumscribed. The [acceleration of technological change] will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. ...

"Before the middle of this century, the growth rates of our technology - which will be indistinguishable from ourselves - will be so steep as to appear essentially vertical. From a strictly mathematical perspective, the growth rates will still be finite but so extreme that the changes they bring about will appear to rupture the fabric of human history. That, at least, will be the perspective of unenhanced biological humanity.

"[The result will ultimately] be no distinction between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequi- vocally human in such a world, it's simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.

"Many commentators on these changes focus on what they perceive as a loss of some vital aspect of our humanity that will result from this transition. This perspective stems, however, from a misunderstanding of what our technology will become. All the machines we have met to date lack the essential subtlety of human biological qualities. Although [long-term technological change] has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits."

delanceyplace.com 10/7/11 - churchill and gandhi

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the centuries leading up to 1900, Britain built an empire of countries around the globe to increase its wealth, in part by granting monopolies to its own citizens at the expense of the citizens of the colony. Chief among these British colonies was India, and chief among those trying to cast off the colonial yoke was Mohandas Gandhi. One of his first broad efforts in this regard was leading a boycott of the British monopoly of India's salt. To Winston Churchill, this made Gandhi an enemy:

"Mohandas Gandhi walked to the ocean with his followers. He had decided to resist the British imperial salt monopoly. [For this], he and sixty thousand followers were imprisoned. In Peshawar, near India's Northwest Frontier [and now part of Pakistan], British troops fired on a crowd of Muslim salt protesters, killing some of them. Air raids 'cleaned up' the Peshawar region afterward, according to The New York Times. ...

"The Associated Press sent in a story from Peshawar. It was August 17, 1930. 'Chastened by a daily rain of bombs from British planes, raiding Afridi tribesmen were reported today in full retreat to the hills of the northwest frontier,' the story said. 'Punishment inflicted on the villages by raiding airplanes was said by officals to have had a salutary effect. The disaffected sections are expected to sue for peace in a short time.' The Times of London, in an editorial, blamed the deaths of Afridi tribesmen on Gandhi's propagandists....

"Gandhi had replaced [the communist Vladimir] Lenin as [Winston] Churchill's arch-nemesis. 'The truth is,' Churchill wrote, 'Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him with cat's-meat.' It was December 11, 1930. A month later, Gandhi was released from jail. He wrote a letter to the viceroy, Lord Irwin. 'Dear Friend,' he said. 'I have received suggestions from friends whose advice I value that I should seek an interview with you.'

"Irwin invited him to the palace. The two men met and talked. They met again and talked - and again. Winston Churchill was disgusted, The British government must, he said in a speech, dissociate itself from this 'weak, wrong-headed' rapprochement: 'It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor. Such a spectacle can only increase the unrest in India.' I was February 23, 1931.

"Mohandas Gandhi [traveled to] England. It was September 12, 1931. He chose to stay at Kingsley House, a home for the poor in London's East End. He made a live broadcast to the United States on CBS radio. 'I personally would wait, if need be for ages, rather than seek to attain the freedom of my country through bloody means,' he said. ... Gandhi talked to the king and queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Master of Balliol, George Bernard Shaw, Lord Lothian, textile workers in Lancashire, and leading Quakers. He wanted to talk to Winston Churchill, but Churchill declined to meet him."

Author: Nicholson Baker
Title: Human Smoke
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date: Copyright 2008 by Nicholson Baker
Pages: 19-20, 22-23, 28

From HUMAN SMOKE by Nicholson Baker. Copyright © 2008 by Nicholson Baker. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc, NY

delanceyplace.com 10/6/11 - the importance of start-ups

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - the extraordinary entrepreneurial culture of Israel:

"[Israel boasts] the highest density of start-ups in the world (a total of 3,850 start-ups, one for every 1,844 Israelis), and more Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ exchange than all companies from the entire European continent. ...

"In 2008, per capita venture capital investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China, and 350 times greater than in India. Com- paring absolute numbers, Israel - a country of just 7.1 million people - attracted close to $2 billion in venture capital, as much as flowed to the United Kingdom's 61 million citizens or to the 145 million people living in Germany and France combined. And Israel is the only country to experience a meaning- ful increase in venture capital from 2007 to 2008 [in the face of the global financial crisis.]

"After the United States, Israel has more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any other country in the world, including India, China, Korea, Singapore, and Ireland. And Israel is the world leader in the percentage of the economy that is spent on research and development. Israel's economy has also grown faster than the average for the developed economies of the world in most years since 1995.

"Even the wars Israel has repeatedly fought have not slowed the country down. During the six years following 2000, Israel was hit not just by the bursting of the global tech bubble but by the most intense period of terrorist attacks in its history and by the second Lebanon war. Yet Israel's share of the global venture capital market did not drop - it doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent. And the Tel Aviv stock exchange was higher on the last day of the Lebanon war than on the first, as it was after the three-week military operation in the Gaza Strip in 2009.

"The Israeli economic story becomes even more curious when one considers the nation's dire state just a little over a half century ago.

"[The importance of start-ups and venture capital in any country is hard to overstate.] According to the pioneering work of Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, technological innovation is the ultimate source of productivity and growth. It' s the only proven way for economies to consistently get ahead - especially innovation born by start-up companies. Recent Census Bureau data show that most of the net employment gains in the United States between 1980 and 2005 came from firms younger than five years old. Without start-ups, the average annual net employment growth rate would actually have been negative."

delanceyplace.com 10/5/11 - the triumph of prohibition

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Prohibition, the greatest failed social experiment in American history, brought with it the growth of organized crime to an unprecedented national scale. And where the American Revolution had been about limiting the power of government to intrude in its citizen's lives, Prohibition brought with it a new era of attempted social engineering that still persists. It began on January 16, 1920 after a full year's notice, and for some this was a lament. But many others were certain it was the dawning of a triumphal new age:

" 'If a family or a nation is sober, nature in its normal course will cause them to rise to a higher civilization. If a family or a nation, on the other hand, is debauched by liquor, it must decline and ultimately perish.'

-Richmond P. Hobson, in the U.S. House
of Representatives, December 22,1914

"The streets of San Francisco were jammed. A frenzy of cars, trucks, wagons, and every other imaginable form of conveyance crisscrossed the town and battled its steepest hills. Porches, staircase landings, and sidewalks were piled high with boxes and crates delivered on the last possible day before trans- porting their contents would become illegal. The next morning, the Chronicle reported that people whose beer, liquor, and wine had not arrived by midnight were left to stand in their doorways 'with haggard faces and glittering eyes.' Just two weeks earlier, on the last New Year's Eve before Prohibition, frantic celebrations had convulsed the city's hotels and private clubs, its neighborhood taverns and wharfside saloons. It was a spasm of desperate joy fueled, said the Chronicle, by great quantities of 'bottled sunshine' liberated from 'cellars, club lockers, bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and other hiding places.' Now, on January 16, the sunshine was surrendering to darkness. ...

"There were of course those who welcomed the day. The crusaders who had struggled for decades to place Prohibition in the Constitution celebrated with rallies and prayer sessions and ritual interments of effigies representing John Barleycorn, the symbolic proxy for alcohol's evils. No one marked the day as fervently as evangelist Billy Sunday, who conducted a revival meeting in Norfolk, Virginia. Ten thousand grateful people jammed Sunday's enormous tabernacle to hear him announce the death of liquor and reveal the advent of an earthly paradise. 'The reign of tears is over,' Sunday proclaimed. 'The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.'

"A similarly grandiose note was sounded by the Anti-Saloon League, the mightiest pressure group in the nation's history. No other organization had ever changed the Constitution through a sustained political campaign; now, on the day of its final triumph, the ASL declared that 'at one minute past midnight ... a new nation will be born.' "

delanceyplace.com 10/4/11 - rebuilding lives in america

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:35:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1940, the executives of Paris-based Lazard Freres, one of the world's greatest investment banking firms, were forced to flee before the Nazis and try and rebuild their lives in America. Andre Meyer, a legend in Paris and perhaps the most powerful of them all, had two impossible tasks - first to escape from Europe and then to ascend the ranks of power in New York as a virtual unknown. His task was made easier, though, because he had kept a large part of his fortune intact and could use it toward both ends:

"The outbreak of war across Europe was of particular concern, understandably, to the partners of Lazard Freres et Cie and to all those people associated with the Paris firm. Kristallnacht had definitively proved Hitler's determination to rid Europe of Jews as quickly as possible. Lazard was one of the best-known Jewish banks in Europe. The David-Weills and Andre Meyer were among the most famous bankers in Europe. So it was not long after the German invasion of Poland that many French Jews began to consider an escape. In the face of the Nazi war machine, survival was now the focus of the Lazard partners - for the firm and for themselves - on both sides of the Atlantic. ...

"After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Andre Meyer ... knew it was just a matter of time before he would have to abandon Paris and, together with his family, leave France. 'Meyer had no illusions about his situation,' Cary Reich wrote. 'He was a prominent Jewish banker working for a prominent Jewish bank.' He had also been outspoken in his efforts to help German Jews escape Germany. And Andre had contributed money to finance a plot to assassinate Hitler.

"By the last week of May 1940, Andre decided the time had come to leave the City of Light. He locked his apartment on the Cours Albert Premier and hired a car and driver to take him to Bordeaux. After a few days there, he packed up his family, and together they headed to the Spanish border. Before leaving Bordeaux, Andre was able to obtain incredibly valuable and hard-to-come-by visas for entry into - and passage through - Spain. At the border, while other [Jewish] refugees from France were standing in interminable lines, often without success - a scene Andre's son, Philippe, remembered vividly as one of complete havoc - the Meyer family was whisked past the hoi polloi and into the country. They took a train to Santander, and then, a few days later, moved on to the relative safety of Lisbon, in Portugal, to begin the arduous [but sucessful] task of obtaining an even more coveted visa for entry into the United States. ...

"There remains to this day resentment about the relative ease of Andre's exit. 'There are people today, whom I met in Paris,' said [future partner] Felix Rohatyn, 'who were related to Andre and who will never forgive him for leaving and leaving them behind, because they went through Spain, which others were not able to do.' ...

"Upon arriving in New York, the Meyers stayed at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Then they moved on to the Delmonico on Park Avenue and then on to a few others before settling, finally, at the ultraluxurious Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, where they took up residence in a two-bedroom suite on the thirty-third floor. All this meandering around the Upper East Side was evidence of just how out of sorts Andre felt beyond the world he had created for himself in Paris. He had been misdiagnosed as having cancer. He had trouble speaking English. He had no clients. Worse, nobody knew who he was or what he had accomplished at Lazard in Paris. He was no longer important to anyone. 'It was all a great shock for him - Nazism, the war, France's defeat,' his son Philippe explained. 'On the personal side, he had been a great, great success, and suddenly everything collapsed, and he had to start all over again. And he didn't know if he had the strength or courage to do it.'

"Finally, sometime around May 1, 1941, Andre recovered from this malaise and headed back into the fray. ... Typically, Andre - in his efforts to regain his previous form - set his sights on the grandest prize of all: wooing as a client the much-admired David Sarnoff, the chairman of RCA. For starters, Andre donated the unheard-of sum of $100,000 to the United Jewish Appeal, one of Sarnoff's favorite charities. Sarnoff, somewhat baffled by such largesse from a man he had neither heard of nor met, sought out Andre, as Andre hoped he would. ... The two hit it off famously; RCA remained a Lazard client for decades. 'Getting the RCA account then was the equivalent of getting the Microsoft account today,' explained Patrick Gerschel, Andre's grandson."

delanceyplace.com 10/3/11 - svengali, trilby, and the first modern best seller

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:35:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the late 1800s, immersed in the craze for hypnotism, British author George (Kicky) Du Maurier wrote Trilby, the first modern best seller - surpassing even the sales of Charles Dickens. In it, a German-Polish musician named Svengali used hypnotism to transform an otherwise tone-deaf young girl named Trilby into a singing sensation. It ended as Svengali, Trilby, and the guileless young man who loved her all tragically died. The book set off a craze, turning bohemianism into a style among young women, and yielding "hats, boots, shoes, collars, toothpastes, coats, soaps, songs and dances named after Trilby":

"In 1894 George du Maurier's second novel, Trilby, was published. ... The book, which was published first in America, became the number one bestseller in 1894, and by the end of the year had sold 300,000 copies. That was only the beginning. It was 1900 before a reporter in New York declared that the Trilby craze was over. It was 'probably the biggest selling novel of all time,' according to its publisher, Mcllvaine at Harper. 'Not even Dickens had attracted such a wide and devoted audience.' It was 'the first modern bestseller', the first to use a sophisticated marketing strategy. In its marketing, as well as in its embrace of modern psychology, Trilby was a turning point. ...

"Smoking roll-up cigarettes, living for freedom, truth and beauty, and on precious little else, Trilby is the very image of bohemianism and innocence, without a sly or nasty cell in her body. Hers is an unusual beauty, subtle, hidden from the casual eye. ... Trilby has, however, one imperfection. She is incapable of appreciating music, as [her] three artist [friends] discover when a German-Polish musician called Svengali arrives and plays 'some of his grandest music', which passes Trilby by. When she herself sings, she reveals a full voice, but, alas, it is excruciatingly out of tune. Rather embarrassingly, because of course she cannot hear it, Trilby is completely tone-deaf. Svengali is fascinated by her. In threatening contrast to childlike Billee [the young artist who loves her], he is a dark Satanic figure possessed of a controlling personality. ...

"He fancies he can bring Trilby to self-expression beyond her wildest dreams. First he hypnotises her therapeutically, to cure her neuralgia. Thereafter, time and again he invades and dominates her mind, and she worships his hypnotic power over her by releasing from her lips the most heavenly music the world has ever known. ... In deep hypnosis but alert to the world, Trilby holds audiences in thrall with her singing. [Yet] hers is a continuing nightmare existence not because she is unhappy - dressed in sables, rouged and pearl powdered, she is, and causes, a sensation - but because her mind has been commandeered. Svengali is in occupation of the control-tower of her thinking. In religious terms, he has her soul; in occult terms, it is a case of possession; in legal terms, it is the ultimate form of psychological abuse. ...

" 'Trilby turned bohemianism into a style,' wrote Jon Savage. 'It was particularly attractive to young women, who, according to Luc Sante, 'derived from it the courage to call themselves artists and bachelor girls, to smoke cigarettes and drink Chianti.' Bohemianism swept Britain and America. Kicky received thousands of letters, both from women identifying with Trilby and from men lusting after her, such that the offer to Kicky of $10,000 for a signed drawing of Trilby in the nude, proposed by David Lodge in Author, Author, seems hardly an embellishment of the truth. John Masefield recalled: 'I well remember hats, boots, shoes, collars, toothpastes, coats, soaps, songs and dances named after Trilby.' "

delanceyplace.com 9/30/11 - learning from insects

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - why study insects? Because the ten million kinds of insects provide an incomparable variety of behaviors - including some whose genitals explode after sex and others who can exercise mind control over other insect species:

"People are more afraid of insects than they are of dying, at least if you believe a 1973 survey published in The Book of Lists. Only public speaking and heights exceeded the six-legged as sources of fear ... And yet for centuries, some of the greatest minds in science have drawn inspiration from studying some of the smallest minds on earth. From Jean Henri Fabre to Charles Darwin to E.O. Wilson, naturalists have been fascinated by the lives of six-legged creatures that seem both frighteningly alien and uncannily familiar. Beetles and earwigs take care of their young, fireflies and crickets flash and chirp for mates, and ants construct elaborate societies, with internal politics that put the U.S. Congress to shame. ...

"Some of it, of course, is the sheer magnitude of almost everything about insects - they are more numerous than any other animal, making up over 80 percent of all species. Estimates of the number of kinds of insects vary wildly, because new ones are being discovered all the time, but there are at least a million, possibly as many as ten million, which means that you could have an 'Insect of the Month' calendar and not need to re-use a species for well over eighty thousand years. Take that, pandas and kittens! At any one moment, say while you are reading this sentence, approximately ten quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects surround you in the world. All of that variety gives enormous scope for evolution to act upon. ... And then there is the sensationalism; nothing gets my students' attention like hearing about male honeybees' genitals exploding after sex, and everyone has shuddered over the female mantis eating her mate. Insects routinely do things that would put the most gruesome horror film to shame. ...

"I haven't seen Green Porno, but if the segment on dragonflies is up to date, it should include a shot of the male's jagged penis as it scoops out the sperm from a previous mate, replacing it with his own. Sperm competition, in which the sperm of multiple males battle inside a female's reproductive tract, was first discovered, and is best understood, in insects, and new aspects of it are being uncovered all the time.

"Insects are even teaching us about mind control, and maybe even about consciousness itself. A tiny wasp called the emerald cockroach wasp can do what many renters cannot: direct the movements of a cockroach. The wasp does this not to rid a kitchen of scuttling invaders but to feed her brood. Many wasps provision their young by paralyzing other insects or spiders and car-rying them back to the wasp's nest. The paralysis, as opposed to out and out killing of the prey, helps the prey stay fresh while the young wasp larva feasts on the flesh. Of course, paralyzed insects can't put themselves into the nest, so the wasp usually has to do all the heavy lifting, staggering under the weight of her groceries as she flies back to her young. Except, that is, in the case of the jewel wasp, so named for the glittery emerald sheen of her exoskeleton. The female wasp doesn't send the roach into an immobile stupor; instead, she makes it into a zombie via a judicious sting inside the roach's head, so that its nervous system, and legs, still function well enough to allow it to walk on its own. Then, as science writer Carl Zimmer describes, 'The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it, like a dog on a leash, to its doom' "

delanceyplace.com 9/29/11 - women in china

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - in Confucian China, women were little more than slaves, a status that remained true through the turn of the twentieth century:

"Nowhere were women treated with greater contempt than in a Confucian state. Chinese ideographs that include the character for 'woman' mean: evil, slave, anger, jealousy, avarice, hatred, suspicion, obstruction, demon, witch, bewitching, fornication, and seduction. Confucius warned gentlemen against being 'too familiar with the lower orders or with women.' As the poet Fu Xuan wrote in the third century:

How sad it is to be a woman!
Nothing on earth is held so cheap.
Boys stand leaning at the door
Like gods fallen out of heaven.

"Marriage in China was less of a union between man and woman than a con- tract of indentured servitude between a girl and her mother-in-law. A wedding was arranged by parents in an effort to advance themselves socially, politically, or financially. In traditional Chinese society a girl married into her husband's family and gave up all contact with her own parents. A bride was subservient to everyone in the new household but especially to her husband's mother, for whom she toiled without rest. Wife and mother-in-law were jealous rivals for the affection of the husband/son. Publicly a husband and wife were indifferent toward each other, never openly acknowledging the existence of the other. In private the wife would have to struggle to win her husband's respect, and only through her grown sons did she have any real hope of security. No wonder she then exhibited little affection toward her son's bride, and the cycle repeated itself.

"A concubine was a serious and usually permanent member of a household. She was brought in to bear a son, after the first wife had failed, then remained as an assistant wife, with all the responsibilities and few of the privileges. Once the man lost interest, she was just another servant. In most cases she was purchased from her parents, so in fact she was a slave, though she could not be discarded without arriving at a settlement with her family."

delanceyplace.com 9/28/11 - espn hemorrhages money

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the negotiations that changed the cable industry. In 1982, ESPN was hemorrhaging losses of over $8 million each month, and was sustained only by continued investments from Getty Oil. Getty became con- cerned and sought additional investors, eventually attracting a minority investment from ABC, but the bleeding continued. Advertising revenues were simply too small. ESPN didn't have enough money to cover operating expenses, much less win television rights to even minor national properties such as NCAA Division II football. What was needed was a new business model - a fact made all the more obvious when CBS Cable failed. ESPN had been paying cable operators for the privilege of being included, but needed to turn that around or fail. The cable operators had to start paying ESPN a monthly fee per subscriber, so ESPN had to bluff that it was going to pull its programming off the air:

BILL GRIMES (ESPN CEO):
Whenever I would look ahead, I would say, we're not going to be able to get enough ad revenue to make this thing profitable. We were buying more programming, and the ad revenues weren't coming. Then we're paying more nickels as every new cable subscriber came on in America. It won't work. Getty is not going to be patient forever.

ROGER WERNER (McKinsey Consultant and later ESPN COO and CEO):
The failure of CBS Cable was one of those watershed dates that opened a big window of opportunity for us. Cable stocks fell dramatically within one or two weeks. It was an obvious reaction, and the press was almost universally negative and predicting bad things for the cable industry. If CBS can't make it as a cable network programmer, how could anybody else like ESPN hope to succeed? So a number of our affiliates, I think, were worried that another failure by another leading cable programming network in 1983 or '84 would be a terrible thing. ...

We went to the market with this sort of survival pitch essentially as follows: If you [cable operators] come in voluntarily and do a new deal with us, we'll start your rate at four cents in 1983 or '84 and then we'll go to six cents the next year, then eight cents. Either rip up the old contract and have protection for whatever the term of your new affiliation agreement is going to be, or pay the prevailing rate when your old deal expires. There was the specter that if we were still around - and we intended to be around-we'd be a much more expensive service.

BILL GRIMES:
We were thrown out of offices. I flew to Denver once to see a company called United Cable that TCI later bought. It was run by a guy by the name of Gene Schneider. He was a guy about my age who had been in the telephone business and then became one of the early cable founders and made big money. I had made an appointment with his secretary, and I sat in a room for two hours waiting to see him, but he refused to see me.

ROGER WERNER:
J.C. [Sparkman, COO of TCI] kind of told us to get f**ked and that TCI would never pay us a penny.

BILL GRIMES:
Cablevision was the first cable operator whose contract had expired that we were trying to get to be the first cable-system company to pay a fee. It was, in many ways, the worst operator to start with because they had some sports programming! Dolan was a tough guy. We had to threaten to turn ESPN off.

ANDY BRILLIANT (ESPN General Counsel):
It was an all-day negotiation that Bill, Roger, and I conducted with the Cablevision people on Long Island. They all got really pissed. There was a lot of walking out of the room and throwing stuff around. It got to the point where we really thought that there wasn't going to be a service.

BILL GRIMES:
There was yelling and screaming. We took quite a beating early on. ...

ROGER WERNER:
Essentially we were saying, guys, if you're not interested in paying a fee and you're really not interested in stepping up to the plate in the near term, tell us now and we'll pull the plug. Nobody really wanted to deal with the idea that they were going to be paying for a product that had been free, but actually my recollection of this is that it was very stress-filled, it was very contentious.

ANDY BRILLIANT:
But at the end of the day, they blinked and agreed to pay us a dime per household. We breathed a massive sigh of relief. It was the first time we actually received validation that our service was worth something to the cable operators. I think that really put us on the map for good.

BILL GRIMES:
I'll never forget. We got in the car and stopped at the first bar we saw. It was a Mexican place. I know I had at least two margaritas. Then we called [Getty Oil Vice President] Stuart Evey on a pay phone. We didn't have cell phones. I said. 'Stu, we got it. We got the toughest one. We got the deal.' And from there it was not easy, but that was the start of it all.

delanceyplace.com 9/27/11 - the beatles first album

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1963, a young band called The Beatles, forged in the nightclubs of Liverpool, England and Hamburg, Germany, had become the hottest act in British music after performing the song "Please Please Me" on the nationally televised pop showcase Thank Your Lucky Stars. Long play (LP) albums were first introduced in 1948 but still infrequently used by rock groups, and soon after Lucky Stars they recorded their first:

"At 10 in the morning on February 11th, 1963, the Beatles ... gathered at Abbey Road studios in London to make a debut album. Twelve hours later, they'd done it. Of all the astonishing things about the album Please Please Me - and there are many - the most impressive may simply be the quick-and-dirty haste with which it was recorded.

"In 2011, it can take a band a dozen hours to mike the kick drum. But in a single long day - with just a £400 budget - the Beatles laid down 10 songs for their album, including some of their most indelible early performances: 'I Saw Her Standing There,' 'There's a Place,' 'Do You Want to Know a Secret,' 'Baby It's You.' The day's work wrapped up, sometime around 10:45, with a shirtless John Lennon roaring himself hoarse through two takes of 'Twist and Shout.' 'It was amazingly cheap, no messing, just a massive effort from us,' Paul McCartney later recalled. 'At the end of the day, you had your album.'

"Coming into that day, the Beatles already had two singles under their belts. In October 1962, they released 'Love Me Do,' the blues vamp that McCartney had first dreamed up while playing hooky from school at age 16. 'Love Me Do' was backed with another Lennon-McCartney original, 'P.S. I Love You,' which offered further evidence of their precocious songwriting gifts and the sheer strangeness - the mixture of rock & roll toughness and old-fashioned tune- smithery, the weirdly beautiful vocal harmonies, the wild left turns of their chord progressions. ...

"The session was a testament to the Beatles' warhorse durability - grinding out song after song, take after take, with unflagging adrenaline. They banged through 13 takes of 'There's a Place,' 12 of 'I Saw Her Standing There,' three of'Anna (Go to Him).' They nailed Ringo Starr's vocal showpiece, 'Boys,' in a single take. They even made 13 passes at 'Hold Me Tight,' a song that was left on the cutting-room floor. When [producer George] Martin, the engineer Norman Smith and the tape operator Richard Langham piled off to a nearby pub for a lunch break, the Beatles stayed behind to rehearse. No one at the session could remember a band playing through lunch.

"Finally, just around 10 p.m., the Beatles had completed nine songs. No one was sure what to do for the final number. Someone suggested the Isley Brothers' 'Twist and Shout,' a barnburning fixture of the Beatles live act, with Lennon on lead vocals. Lennon was suffering from a cold; after 12 straight hours of singing, his voice was nearly shot. But he decided to give it a try. He sucked on a couple of throat lozenges, gargled a glass of milk and headed onto the studio floor. Two takes later, the album was a wrap.

" 'The last song nearly killed me,' Lennon said years later. 'Every time I swallowed it was like sandpaper. I was always bitterly ashamed of it, because I could sing it better than that; but now it doesn't bother me. You can hear that I'm just a frantic guy doing his best.'

"Even when frantic, the Beatles' best was awfully good. Please Please Me is now considered a landmark. It captures the group at its scruffiest and most 'bar band' - it is a document, as Lennon once said, of the Beatles before they were 'the "clever" Beatles.' As their career took off, the Beatles got artier, more sophisticated, more visionary. But they were never purer than on Please
Please Me."

delanceyplace.com 9/26/11 - hitler's hyperinflation

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the early 1920s, a small, fringe political group led by an inexperienced Adolph Hitler was able to get more attention than it ever deserved because German economic circumstances were catastrophic. Hyperinflation destroyed savings accounts, families and lives. In 1923, a single egg cost as much as 30 million eggs had cost in 1913, and Hitler himself had to pay one billion marks for a single beer on the night of his historic beer hall putsch. When this hyperinflation was finally tamed, Hitler and his party began to dramatically lose votes and influence. But Hitler's luck returned - in 1929, the U.S. led Great Depression brought renewed economic catastrophe across the globe and his party once again made gains in German national elections:

"Another aspect of fate, in the guise of the inflation, also appeared to be working in favor of Hitler and his march on Berlin. By the beginning of October it took 6,014,300 marks to equal a single prewar mark. The price of one egg equaled that of 30,000,000 in 1913. Many municipalities and industrial firms took to printing their own 'emergency money' to meet expenses. The Reichs- bank could not refuse to accept this emergency money or to treat it as of equal value with their own notes.

"The printing of government money itself became farcical: a thousand-mark note issued in Berlin the previous December was now stamped over in red: Ein Milliarde Mark; and a 500,000,000-mark note printed by the Bavarian State Bank a few weeks earlier was stamped: Zwanzig Milliarden Mark. This 20-billion-mark note presumably could be exchanged for more than $800, but by the time the holder of the modest-looking little note with the astronomical figure got to the cashier it would be worth a fraction of that - providing any cashier was willing to surrender hard foreign currency for it. People were frantic. They dared not hold currency for an hour, a missed trolley car to the bank could mean a man's monthly salary was reduced to a quarter or less. A waiter in Baden told a young American reporter, Ernest Hemingway, that he had saved up enough money for a Gasthaus. Now the money wouldn't buy four bottles of champagne. 'Germany debases her money to cheat the Allies [out of reparations],' said the waiter. 'But what do I get out of it?'

"The burden of inflation naturally fell on those who could not pay with notes - the workers and the elderly. The first were reduced to a near starvation diet and the latter were brought to poverty level overnight. Pensioners and those who lived on interest from bonds and life insurance found themselves destitute. Securities bought with gold marks were paid off in paper money that deteriorated in value in one's hand. In America only Southerners, whose families had suffered a similar fate after the Civil War days, would have understood.

"About the only ones who rejoiced were those deeply in debt who could pay off their obligations with worthless paper. But the greatest beneficiaries were the exchange barons, the profiteers and opportunistic foreigners who bought up jewelry and real estate at ridiculously low prices. Large estates and buildings went to these vultures for a few hundred dollars. Family heirlooms were exchanged for enough to feed a family a few weeks. There were scenes beyond belief: a woman who had left a basket-full of money on the street, returning a moment later to find the money dumped in the gutter and the basket stolen; a worker with a salary of two billion marks a week able to buy his family only potatoes."

delanceyplace.com 9/23/11 - dorothy's gray kansas

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the joyless gray prairies of Kansas, as depicted in Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz - the great American fairytale whose message was more "self-reliance" than "no place like home." Baum first lived in upstate New York, but visited Kansas on tour with his failing acting troupe in the late 1800s, and viewed it as the bleakest part of the country. The middle of the country was bleak and forbidding - long before the dustbowl days of the Great Depression. In the mid-1800s, the great railroad companies, in conjunction with the U.S. government, had attempted to populate new towns along the new transcontinental railway by recruiting from the East coast and offering free land. They had limited success so had supplemented their efforts by recruiting farmers from Europe. The farmers in these regions faced an unforgiving climate, and were hit hard by the depressions of 1873 and 1893.

In the book, the bleakness of Kansas stands in contrast to the wonders of Oz, which was based on the dazzling world exposition held in Chicago in 1893. In the MGM movie based on the book, Dorothy's family was warmhearted and smiling. However, Baum's book depicted the orphan Dorothy's Uncle Henry and Aunt Em as sad, gray people who never laughed. Here they are described in the very first pages of Baum's classic tale:

"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar - except a small hole, dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap-door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.

"When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

"When Aunt Em came there to live she was a pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her checks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

"Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.

"It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long, silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny wee nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly."

delanceyplace.com 9/22/11 - making mistakes

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - making errors is normal, and making mistakes is a necessary part of learning. In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov's brilliant distillation of forty-nine techniques for teachers to use to improve student performance, he writes that teachers should normalize error and avoid chastening students for getting things wrong. (Lemov's book has application far beyond the classroom):

"Error followed by correction and instruction is the fundamental process of schooling. You get it wrong, and then you get it right. If getting it wrong and then getting it right is normal, teachers should normalize error and respond to both parts of this sequence as if they were totally and completely normal. After all, they are.

WRONG ANSWERS: DON'T CHASTEN; DON'T EXCUSE

"Avoid chastening wrong answers, for example, 'No, we already talked about this. You have to flip the sign, Ruben.' And do not make excuses for students who get answers wrong: 'Oh, that's okay, Charlise. That was a really hard one.' In fact, if wrong answers are truly a normal and healthy part of the learning process, they don't need much narration at all.

"It's better, in fact, to avoid spending a lot of time talking about wrongness and get down to the work of fixing it as quickly as possible. Although many teachers feel obligated to name every answer as right or wrong, spending time making that judgment is usually a step you can skip entirely before getting to work. For example, you could respond to a wrong answer by a student named Noah by saying, 'Let's try that again, Noah. What's the first thing we have to do?' or even, 'What's the first thing we have to do in solving this kind of problem, Noah?' This second situation is particularly interesting because it remains ambiguous to Noah and his classmates whether the answer was right or wrong as they start reworking the problem. There's a bit of suspense, and they will have to figure it out for themselves. When and if you do name an answer as wrong, do so quickly and simply ('not quite') and keep moving. Again, since getting it wrong is normal, you don't have to feel bad about it. In fact, if all students are getting all questions right, the work you're giving them isn't hard enough.

RIGHT ANSWERS: DON'T FLATTER; DON'T FUSS

"Praising right answers can have one of two perverse effects on students. If you make too much of fuss, you suggest to students - unless it's patently obvious that an answer really is exceptional - that you're surprised that they got the answer right. And as a variety of social science research has recently documented, praising students for being 'smart' perversely incents them not to take risks (apparently they worry about no longer looking smart if they get things wrong), in contrast to praising students for working hard, which incents them to take risks and take on challenges.

"Thus, in most cases when a student gets an answer correct, acknowledge that the student has done the work correctly or has worked hard; then move on:

" 'That's right, Noah. Nice work.' Champion teachers show their students they expect both right and wrong to happen by not making too big a deal of either. Of course, there will be times when you want to sprinkle in stronger praise ('Such an insightful answer, Carla. Awesome'). Just do so carefully so that such praise isn't diluted by overuse."

[Editor's note: We were reminded of this principle recently when touring the Franklin Institute's nationally recognized Science Leadership Academy and finding that the powerful learning mantra of the engineering department was "fail early, fail often."]

delanceyplace.com 9/21/11 - mao's successor deng xiaoping

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Deng Xiaoping (1904 - 1997) took de facto leadership of China shortly after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The country was then in a chaotic and catastrophic condition, but has since ascended past Japan to become the second largest economy in the world. Deng is widely credited as the leader that led China toward a market economy, its current prominence, and economic success:

"In March 1979 Sir Murray MacLehose, the widely respected Chinese-speaking British governor of Hong Kong, flew to Beijing to explain Hong Kong's problems. Told in advance only that he would meet a high official, MacLehose was delighted to learn after he arrived that he would be meeting Deng Xiaoping, who had just been named China's preeminent leader. During an intimate meeting in the Great Hall of the People, MacLehose told Deng about the growing difficulties confronting Hong Kong. As both men well knew, the British had ruled the colony of Hong Kong since the Opium War, but the lease from China for most of the land that was now part of Hong Kong would expire in 1997. Governor MacLehose was measured and diplomatic as he talked of the need to reassure Hong Kong people deeply worried about what might happen after 1997. Deng listened attentively to Governor MacLehose's concerns and then, as they rose after their talk and moved toward the door, he beckoned to MacLehose. The governor, well over six feet tall, leaned over to hear the words of his five-foot host: 'If you think governing Hong Kong is hard, you ought to try governing China.'

"Deng was acutely aware that China was in a disastrous state. At the beginning of the previous decade, during the Great Leap Forward, more than thirty million people had died. The country was still reeling from the Cultural Rev- olution in which young people had been mobilized to attack high-level officials and, with Mao's support, push them aside as the country of almost one billion people was plunged into chaos. The average per capita income of Chinese peasants, who made up 80 percent of the population, was then only $40 per year. The amount of grain produced per person had fallen below what it had been in 1957.

"Military officials and revolutionary rebels had been moved in to replace the senior party officials who had been forced out, but they were unprepared and unqualified for the positions they had assumed. The military had become bloated and was neglecting the military tasks, while military officers in civilian jobs were enjoying the perquisites of offices without performing the work. The transportation and communication infrastructure was in disarray. The bigger factories were still operating with technology imported from the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and the equipment was in a state of disrepair. Universities had been basically closed down for almost a decade. Educated youth had been forcibly sent to the countryside and it was becoming harder to make them stay. Yet in the cities there were no jobs for them, nor for the tens of millions of peasants wanting, to migrate there. Further, the people who were already living in the cities, fearing for their jobs, were not ready to welcome newcomers. ...

"Deng faced a tall order, and an unprecedented one: at the time, no other Communist country had succeeded in reforming its economic system and bringing sustained rapid growth, let alone one with one billion people in a state of disorder.

"Despite Deng's diminutive stature, once he became the preeminent leader, when he appeared in a room he had a commanding presence that made him a natural center of attention. More than one observer commented that it was as if the electricity in the room flowed to him. He had the concentrated intensity of someone determined to resolve important matters. He possessed the natural poise of a former wartime military commander as well as the self-assurance that came from half a century of dealing with life-and-death issues near the center of power. Having faced ups and downs, and been given time to recover with support from his wife, children, and close colleagues, he had become comfortable with who he was. When he did not know something, he readily admitted it. President Jimmy Carter commented that Deng, unlike Soviet leaders, had an inner confidence that allowed one to get directly into substantive issues.

"He did not dwell on what might have been or who was at fault for past errors; as in bridge, which he played regularly, he was ready to play the hand he was dealt. He could recognize and accept power realities and operate within the boundaries of what seemed possible. Once Mao was no longer alive to look over his shoulder, Deng was sufficiently sure of himself and his authority that with guests he could be relaxed, spontaneous, direct, witty, and disarmingly frank. At a state banquet in Washington in January 1979, when told by [American actress] Shirley MacLaine about a Chinese intellectual who was so grateful for what he had learned about life after being sent to the countryside to raise tomatoes during the Cultural Revolution, Deng's patience was soon exhausted. He interrupted her to say, 'He was lying' and went on to tell her how horrible the Cultural Revolution had been."

delanceyplace.com 9/20/11 - barter economies versus credit economies

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - almost everyone, from Aristotle to Adam Smith to almost every college economics textbook, explains the origin of money in the same way. It was an evolutionary process - first came barter, then when barter proved cumbersome money was introduced, and then as societies became even more complex credit was introduced. There's only one problem with this - there is no evidence that a true barter economy ever existed, and there is ample evidence that the opposite occurred. Archeologists have found that all civilizations where there is any archeological evidence of money began with credit, and money (including coins) was simply one form of tracking these IOUs. In other words, credit existed from the very inception of civilization:

"The story [that money arose from bartering] is everywhere. It is the founding myth of our system of economic relations. It is so deeply established in common sense ... that most people on earth couldn't imagine any other way that money possibly could have come about. The problem is there's no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not.

"For centuries now, explorers have been trying to find this fabled land of barter - none with success. Adam Smith set his story in aboriginal North America (others preferred Africa or the Pacific). In Smith's time, at least it could be said that reliable information on Native American economic systems was unavailable in Scottish libraries. But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan's descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published - and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women's councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information.

"Stanley Jevons, for example, who in 1871 wrote what has come to be considered the classic book on the origins of money, took his examples straight from Smith, with Indians swapping venison for elk and beaver hides, and made no use of actual descriptions of Indian life that made it clear that Smith had simply made this up. Around that same time, missionaries, adventurers, and colonial administrators were fanning out across the world, many bringing copies of Smith's book with them, expecting to find the land of barter. None ever did. They discovered an almost endless variety of economic systems. But to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transaction between neighbors takes the form of 'I'll give you twenty chickens for that cow.'

"The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: 'No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.'

"Now, all this hardly means that barter does not exist - or even that it's never practiced by the sort of people that Smith would refer to as 'savages.' It just means that it's almost never employed, as Smith imagined, between fellow villagers. Ordinarily, it takes place between strangers, even enemies. ...

"In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money: his- torically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency."

delanceyplace.com 9/19/11 - hitler begs

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - at the age of twenty, in Vienna, with both parents dead and his meager inheritance dwindling, Adolf Hitler resorts to begging for money:

"By late fall he had sold most of his clothes, including his black winter overcoat, and so the snow and cold drove him to further humiliation. Huddled in a light jacket late one afternoon just before Christmas, he trudged all the way to Meidling in the outskirts of town. It took two and a half hours to reach his destination, the Asyl fur Obdachlose, a shelter for the destitute, and by the time he arrived be was exhausted, his feet sore. Run by a philanthropic society whose principal supporter was the Epstein family, it was originally constructed in 1870 and had been extensively rebuilt and reopened the year before. ...

"On that cold December evening Hitler lined up with the other shivering, dejected ones outside the main gate of the Asyl. At last the door opened and the mob of homeless quietly filed in to be segregated by sex, with children accompanying mothers. Hitler got a card entitling him to a week's lodging, and an assignment to one of the large dormitories. To a young man who cherished privacy it must have been a harrowing experience. First he had to endure the humiliation of showering in public and having his bug-ridden clothes disinfected; then his group was trooped like prison inmates to the main dining hall for soup and bread.

"It would be difficult for anyone but another recipient of institutionalized charity to understand the shame suffered by a proud young man on his first day within the gates of such an establishment. Entrance into an institution like the Asyl with its efficiency and protectiveness marks an irrevocable enrollment into the bottom rank of the destitute. ...

"A wandering servant in a nearby cot took charge of Hitler. He showed him the ropes: to stay at the Asyl more than the prescribed week, for example, one had only to buy for a few kreuzer the unused portions of admittance cards of those leaving. The servant - his name was Reinhold Hanisch - also had dreams of being an artist and was impressed by Adolf's facile talk. Hitler, in turn, was fascinated by the tales that Hanisch, who had spent several years in Berlin, spun about Germany. ...

"More important, Hanisch taught his student that to survive a winter in the lower depths not a step must be wasted nor an opportunity lost: on mornings they left the Asyl - Adolf in his threadbare jacket, 'blue and frostbitten ' - early enough to negotiate the long walk to 'Kathie's' in time for soup; then to a warming room or a hospital for several hours' protection from the bitter cold and a little soup, and back to the Asyl at dusk just as the gate opened. In between the major stops they would occasionally earn a few kreuzer by shoveling snow or carrying baggage at the Westbahnhof. But Hitler was too weak for much physical labor; every step on his sore feet was painful. Once there was a call for ditchdiggers and Hitler wondered if be should apply. Hanisch advised him to forget it. 'If you begin such bard work it is very difficult to climb up.'

"Adolf tried his luck at begging. But he had neither the talent nor the gall for panhandling and became a client of a comrade at the Asyl who made a living by selling addresses of those who were 'soft touches.' Hitler agreed to split the proceeds fifty-fifty and set off with not only the addresses but specific instruc- tions for each customer; for example, he was to greet an old lady on the Schottenring with a 'Praised be Jesus Christ,' and then say he was an unemployed church painter or a woodcutter of holy figures. Usually she gave two kronen for such a story, but Hitler only got religious platitudes for his trouble. He had similar bad luck with the other prospects and he again turned to the Church, where he got three meat patties and one kronen from the Mother Superior by greeting her with a 'Praised be Jesus Christ,' along with a reference to the St. Vincent Association."

delanceyplace.com 9/16/11 - james bond's work ethic

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - at the age of twenty-four, Sean Connery had his first exposure to acting - a minor part in a touring company of South Pacific - as well as an offer to play soccer for Manchester United. Still trying to escape the poverty of Scotland and reasoning that his athletic career could only last a few years, Connery plunged into a program of self-improvement:

"None of [his career] might have come to pass had Connery not palled up with Robert Henderson, the touring version of South Pacific's Captain Brackett, and an actor with more than a passing interest in the history of his craft and the theatrical tradition sustaining it. As 1953 became 1954, Connery and Hen- derson shared lodgings during the show's nine-week stint at the Manchester Opera House and the older man (born in Michigan in 1904, Henderson was a couple of years senior to Connery's father) took the younger man under his wing.

The tutelage began when the two men were walking home one night and Henderson casually mentioned Ibsen. Who's Ibsen? asked Connery. Hen- derson explained saying that, if he were interested, Connery should read Hedda Gabler or The Wild Duck or even When We Dead Awaken. 'I was so impressed by actors and how articulate they were,' Connery later recalled. 'How much they seemed to know about everything. I was impressed by most people I met. I was impressed by people that could express themselves. I had no confidence in terms of intellect at all because I'd had absolutely no exposure to it.' And so, the next morning he took himself off to the local library and started working his way through Henderson's reading list. When he had finished, he returned to his mentor for more suggestions.

"Henderson was taken aback: 'Most young men are keen to be stars,' he would say years later, 'but they're also dead lazy.' Not this young man Connery, though, who took Henderson's next batch of suggestions - among them works by Proust, Stendhal and Tolstoy - and earnestly worked his way through them, too. Also in that second list of required reading was a work of non-fiction - Constantin Stanislavsky's My Life in Art.

"Now this is not one of Stanislavsky's works of high theory. For the most part it is a memoir of a young man growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia. But the book, first published in 1924, was hot once more because of something that had been going on in the American theatre and cinema. Marlon Brando's work - particularly his work as Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan's movie version of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) - had made Stanislavsky's acting technique (the Method, Stanislavsky's preferred term - or the System) famous all around the world. ...

"Late [each] night, when the show was over and he was back in his lodgings, he would carry on working his way through the classical repertoire. The mornings he gave over to self-administered elocution lessons, reading aloud into a tape recorder and listening to the results with a disgusted grimace. Movie critics might have joked about the mouthful of marbles through which Marlon Brando mumbled his every utterance, but Brando's slips and slurs were crystalline in their clarity when set beside Connery's twisted Scots vowels. One of his South Pacific co-stars, Millicent Martin (fifty years later a regular on the U.S. sitcomFrasier), could understand so little of what Connery said that she believed he came, like Brando's Kowalski, from Poland.

"Afternoons, meanwhile, Connery spent studying other touring shows. He watched anything and everything, from mainstream comedies and thrillers through Shakespeare, to the latest avant-garde productions. He was, Henderson would remember, a quick study, picking up a trick here, a tic there and all the while refining that Edinburgh brogue, though never let it be said that Connery is one of those stars who merely got lucky. The popular imagination likes the idea of the untutored star because it means that success is almost accidental and therefore potentially available to all. But regardless of his lack of formal training, Sean Connery worked very hard at his craft."

delanceyplace.com 9/15/11 - andre agassi's last tennis match

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - tennis champion Andre Agassi. In this passage from his stunningly honest autobiography, Agassi writes about the final tournament of his life and the preparation for a match that may be last of his career - and about the loneliness of tennis:

"Now I can take a nap. At thirty-six, the only way I can play a late match, which could go past midnight, is if I get a nap beforehand. Also, now that I know roughly who I am, I want to close my eyes and hide from it. When I open my eyes, one hour has passed. I say aloud, It's time. No more hiding. I step into the shower again, but this shower is different from the morning shower. The afternoon shower is always longer - twenty-two minutes, give or take - and it's not for waking up or getting clean. The afternoon shower is for encouraging myself, coaching myself.

"Tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself. No athletes talk to themselves like tennis players. Pitchers, golfers, goalkeepers, they mutter to themselves, of course, but tennis players talk to themselves - and answer. In the heat of a match, tennis players look like lunatics in a public square, ranting and swearing and conducting Lincoln-Douglas debates with their alter egos. Why? Because tennis is so damned lonely. Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players - and yet boxers have their corner men and managers. Even a boxer's opponent provides a kind of companionship, someone he can grapple with and grunt at.

"In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else. The rules forbid a tennis player from even talking to his coach while on the court. People sometimes mention the track-and-field runner as a comparably lonely figure, but I have to laugh. At least the runner can feel and smell his opponents. They're inches away. In tennis you're on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement, which inevitably leads to self-talk, and for me the self-talk starts here in the afternoon shower. This is when I begin to say things to myself, crazy things, over and over, until I believe them. For instance, that a quasi-cripple [me] can compete at the U.S. Open. That a thirty-six- year-old man can beat an opponent just entering his prime. I've won 869 matches in my career, fifth on the all-time list, and many were won during the afternoon shower.

"With the water roaring in my ears - a sound not unlike twenty thousand fans - I recall particular wins. Not wins the fans would remember, but wins that still wake me at night. Squillari in Paris. Blake in New York. Pete in Australia. Then I recall a few losses. I shake my head at the disappointments. I tell myself that tonight will be an exam for which I've been studying twenty-nine years. Whatever happens tonight, I've already been through it at least once before. If it's a physical test, if it's mental, it's nothing new.

"Please let this be over.

"I don't want it to be over.

"I start to cry. I lean against the wall of the shower and let go."

delanceyplace.com 9/14/11 - "american blood on american soil"

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:21:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the U.S. Constitution reserves the power to declare war for the legislative branch. However, in the two centuries that have passed since then, that power has eroded so completely that contemporary presidents - whether for Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya - allow Congress only perfunctory involvement in the decision. This change came largely not in the 21st century, but instead on May 13, 1846. President James K. Polk - the man who would double the size of the country by perfecting the annexation of Texas, seizing California and New Mexico from Mexico, and successfully negotiating with Britain for the acquisition of the Oregon Territory - provoked the Mexican-American War of 1846 by sending troops into the disputed border between Texas and Mexico. When the Mexican army predictably attacked killing eleven American dragoons and capturing twenty-six others, Polk declared, "Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil." He presented the war to Congress asfait accompli and Congress complied, passing his war act in the House by 174 votes to 14 and in the Senate by 40 votes to 2:

"In the evolution of American presidential power, it is difficult to overstate the transition that occurred on May 13, 1846. The framers of the Constitution specifically reserved the power to declare war for the legislative branch. While chief executives had routinely defended American interests abroad with military means as early as Jefferson's actions against the Barbary pirates in 1801, Congress took its war-making powers very seriously. The American declaration of war against Great Britain in June 1812 had been a congressional affair. Architect of the Constitution that he was, President James Madison knew full well where the power to declare war was lodged. In the spring of 1812, Madison agonized over sending a war message to Congress, doing so only after considerable pressure from war hawks in the House of Representatives led by a young Henry Clay.

"The House debated four days before passing the measure 79 to 49, and even then, Congressman Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire judged 'the business was too hasty.' The Senate took four times as long before finally voting to declare war on June 17, 1812, by a margin of 19 to 13. It would prove to be far and away the closest war vote in American history."

"Thirty-four years later, not only did James K. Polk almost demand that Congress recognize that a state of war already existed, but also he left little doubt that those who failed to respond to his charge would be branded as cowards. The House of Representatives took only two hours to debate the president's message before passing a declaration of war. The Senate took a day more before passing it.

"The next time that an American president asked Congress for a declaration of war, the response was largely the same, although William McKinley was [seemingly] far more reluctant than Polk in presenting his request. On April 25, 1898, two months after the battleship Maine was sunk in Havana harbor - there is still some debate over the cause - Congress rushed to pass McKinley's war message by large margins.

" 'By God, don't your President know where the war-declaring power is lodged?' one senator thundered to Assistant Secretary of State Rufus Day when McKinley appeared to drag his feet in the hope of some last-minute settlement. But that was the last time that Congress would attempt to take the lead or even seriously assert its constitutional war powers."

delanceyplace.com 9/13/11 - how to become a successful fantasy writer

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:18:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - when J.M. Barrie was seven years old, long before he became famous and wealthy as the author of Peter Pan and one London's most successful playwrights, his thirteen year old brother David died unexpectedly. David was the favorite of his mother Margaret, and after he died she remained bedridden, barely acknowledging J.M. (then known as Jamie). The only way he could get her love and attention was to pretend he was David, listen to her stories of make-believe, and tell her his own:

" 'My mother lay in bed with [David's] christening robe beside her, and I peeped in many times at the door and then went to the stair and sat on it and sobbed. I know not if it was that first day, or many days afterwards, that there came to me my sister, the daughter my mother loved the best [Jane Ann]; ... This sister, who was then passing out of her teens, came to me with a very anxious face and wringing her hands, and she told me to go in to my mother and say to her that she still had another boy. I went in excitedly, but the room was dark, and when I heard the door shut and no sound come from the bed I was afraid, and I stood still. I suppose I was breathing hard, or perhaps I was crying, for after a time I heard a listless voice that had never been listless before say, 'Is that you?' I think the tone hurt me, for I made no answer, and then the voice said more anxiously, 'Is that you?' again. I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little lonely voice, 'No, it's not him, it's just me . . .'

" 'Many a time she fell asleep speaking to him, and even while she slept her lips moved and she smiled as if he had come back to her, and when she woke he might vanish so suddenly that she started up bewildered and looked about her, and then said slowly, 'My, David's dead!'

"Nothing Jamie could do would make her forget David. But how he tried.

" 'After that I sat a great deal in her bed trying to make her forget him ... and if I saw any one out of doors do something that made others laugh I immed- iately hastened to that dark room and did it before her. I suppose I was an odd little figure; I have been told that my anxiety to brighten her gave my face a strained look and put a tremor into the joke. I would stand on my head in the bed, my feet against the wall, and then cry excitedly, 'Are you laughing, mother?' . . . I remember once only making her laugh before witnesses. I kept a record of her laughs on a piece of paper, a stroke for each, and it was my custom to show this proudly to the doctor every morning ... It was doubtless [Jane Ann] who told me not to sulk when my mother lay thinking of him, but to try instead to get her to talk about him ... At first, they say, I was often jealous, stopping her fond memories with the cry, 'Do you mind nothing about me?' but that did not last ... He had such a cheery way of whistling, she had told me, it had always brightened her at her work to hear him whistling, and when he whistled he stood with his legs apart, and his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers ... I had learned his whistle ... from boys who had been his comrades, I secretly put on a suit of his clothes . . . and thus disguised I slipped, unknown to the others into my mother's room ...

"After this crushing simulation, in which he surrendered to David an exclusive claim on his mother's love, and swallowed her rejection of him, 7-year-old Jamie switched the focus from himself and David, and persuaded his mother to tell him about her own childhood.

"He then began to feature the child his mother had once been in sentimental made-up stories, and 'this girl in a blue dress and bonnet with white ribbons' was reborn in tales 'of desert islands and enchanted gardens, with knights on leaping chargers'.

"Margaret, 'a wonder at making-believe' - and astonishingly self-centred - rose to the fantasy which became the basis of their relationship. Throughout his boyhood she would tell Jamie about [her childhood]. And the stories continued in turn to pour out from Jamie, eventually to become, in his thirties, [his] whole [highly successful] novels. Always there was a character in them [based] on Margaret. 'I soon grow tired of writing tales unless I can see a little girl, of whom my mother has told me, wandering confidently through the pages.'

"He would bring the manuscript of a new novel from London, and sit on her bed (for Margaret was often in bed, with Jane Ann in attendance), while she looked for herself in its pages. When she found the character, she would cackle excitedly, and all would be well."

delanceyplace.com 9/12/11 - mexico nationalizes exxon and shell

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the president of Mexico nationalized the local operations of all foreign oil companies - including Exxon and Shell - in 1938. America retaliated with boycotts, forcing Mexico to look to Hitler and Germany to buy its oil. This echoed the overtures of Germany to Mexico twenty years earlier in World War I, and was another low point in the 200 year, up-and-down relationship between Mexico and the United States:

"[In 1938], foreign oil companies defied a ruling of the Mexican Supreme Court that they had promised to accept [regarding back-wages in a fiercely fought union dispute] and, as a result, had their holdings nationalized. When that happened, the United States and Britain boycotted Mexican oil and applied other punitive sanctions.

"The issue leading to the nationalization involved a payment of $7.2 million that a Mexican court declared was owed to oil workers by the foreign companies, mainly Standard Oil of New Jersey - now Exxon-Mobil - and Royal Dutch Shell. Between them, they controlled 60 percent of Mexico's oil production. The companies had agreed to abide by whatever decision the Supreme Court made. But when they reneged and refused to pay, they were declared in contempt of court and the government took them over. The companies said their holdings were worth $450 million, but the Mexican government placed the figure at just $10 million.

"Playing a key role in the nationalization was ... Miguel Aleman, then governor of the state of Veracruz, Mexico's main producer of oil. He rallied his fellow governors behind President Lazaro Cardenas, who carried out the national- ization. Cardenas's action was a hit with Mexicans, 200,000 of whom filled theZocalo - the historic town plaza in front of the presidential palace in Mexico City - to voice their support. They formed lines to the palace, offering everything from family heirlooms to chickens to help pay the debt to the foreign oil companies. Besides boycotting Mexican oil, many American and British banks withdrew their deposits from Mexican banks. The United States also stopped buying Mexican silver.

"Faced with an economic crisis - it had oil but no markets or tankers - Mexico felt forced in 1938 to turn to the United States' future enemies for help: Germany, Italy and Japan. Mexican oil technicians were sent for training in Germany and Italy. Those countries provided oil tankers. German and Italian cars were soon replacing American models on Mexican highways; some of those highways were being built under contract to Japanese companies. Adolf Hitler dispatched to Mexico two representatives of the Reich Import Board of Petroleum who signed a barter agreement for power plants in the towns of Ixtapatango and Palmito in exchange for oil.

"The German Navy also signed deals to purchase oil. 'The Hitler-led economic and ideological invasion of Mexico by the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis is another link being forged on the international ball-and-chain that binds Mexico,' wrote one Mexico-based American writer, J.H. Plenn. 'Mexico seeks economic lifebelts in a threatened shipwreck, provoked by pressure from the [U.S.] Democratic government acting on behalf of their investors.' Soon German and Italian intelligence agents were setting up shop in Mexico. Vicente Lombardo Toledano, leader of Mexico's labor movement, claimed Germany was bribing editors of some leading newspapers and magazines to publish favorable news stories and editorials.

"As it had during World War I, when it courted Mexico, Germany saw a strategic advantage in any strained relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor. It assigned the German High Command's intelligence chief, Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, to exploit the situation. A man who spoke Spanish fluently enough to pass himself off as a Chilean-German, Canaris was at ease dealing with Latin American issues. He saw Mexico as a potential base from which his Abwehr agents could be infiltrated into the United States. The existence of such a privileged sanctuary depended upon the Mexican security forces maintaining a decidedly lax attitude toward German agents. Canaris counted on such benevolence because he was sure the Mexicans understood that jailing the agents of a good petroleum customer might have disastrous economic consequences. But by 1942, Mexico was a combatant on the Allied side in World War II."

delanceyplace.com 9/9/11 - the first telegraph and the first american railroad

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - on May 24, 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse sent the first telegraph message between Washington and Baltimore. The message was"What hath God wrought." It so happened that the Democratic Convention to nominate its presidential and vice presidential candidates was being held in Baltimore at almost that same time. In those times, presidential candidates often did not attend these conventions lest they seem too ambitious - some not even coming to the convention city - and so the telegraph came into immediate use:

"That the two major political parties should both hold their 1844 nominating conventions in Baltimore was not the coincidence that it might seem. Party nominating conventions were still relatively new creations. The congressional caucus system had been abandoned after 1824, and the nominating convention as a media event had been only recently introduced by the hype and hoopla of the Whigs' 1840 log cabin campaign [Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!]. With geographic location and favorite-son considerations not yet as important as they would become to future conventions, why not meet in the same city?

"Baltimore had numerous advantages. A southern city by demeanor, it was nonetheless centrally located to most of the country and an easy day's travel from Washington. With a population just over one hundred thousand, Baltimore was the queen of the Chesapeake and the second-largest city in the United States, after New York and Just before Philadelphia. Commercial competition among these three was fierce, particularly after the opening of the Erie Canal boosted New York's fortunes.

"In 1828, after promoters of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal announced a route along the Potomac River that bypassed Baltimore, city fathers began con- struction on what was to become America's first railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio. The railroad company built west from Baltimore toward the Ohio River but also began a branch line south toward Washington. Andrew Jackson was the first president to ride the rails, and on August 25, 1835, regular rail service was inaugurated between Baltimore and the nation's capital.

"In 1843, Samuel E B. Morse, a painter by trade, obtained permission from the Baltimore & Ohio to construct an experimental telegraph line along the railroad's right of way between Baltimore and Washington. The first few miles of wire were initially buried alongside the tracks in a lead pipe, but a com- bination of rocky ground and inadequate insulation quickly led workers to string wire aboveground between wooden poles. By the spring of 1844, Morse had installed one telegraph instrument in the Pratt Street station of the Baltimore & Ohio in Baltimore and another in the Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol in Washington and was about ready to conduct a test. ...

"[In a contentious and chaotic convention, James Polk was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate.] Only five days earlier, on May 24, Anne Ellsworth, the daughter of the commissioner of patents, had chosen the phrase 'What hath God wrought' for Samuel Morse to use as a test message for his telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. The test had been a success, and now news of Polk's nomination flashed in an instant across the distance of forty miles to Washington. Many of the Democrats on Capitol Hill knew Polk personally from his service there, and Polk's nomination met with as great a cheer as had filled the hall at Baltimore." ...

"The excited delegates reassembled after lunch to take up the vice presidential nomination. Benjamin Butler suggested that in the interest of harmony - as well as a strong Democratic turnout in New York state - the nomination should be offered to Silas Wright. With only eight Georgians voting against it, Wright's nomination was promptly made, and word of it flashed to Wright in Washing- ton by telegraph. But Wright was still miffed by the convention's rejection of [his ally] Martin Van Buren. ... Back came Wright's answer by telegraph from Washington that he declined the nomination. Butler was certain that Wright could be convinced otherwise, and a telegraphic exchange ensued. Having said no four times by telegraph, Wright finally dispatched two congressmen in a wagon to drive to Baltimore - the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad did not yet operate at night - and convey his answer in no uncertain terms."

delanceyplace.com 9/8/11 - chinese christian converts

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - efforts by Christian missionaries in the 1800s to convert the largely rural Chinese to their faith stumbled badly, amid cultural dissonance, social and political maneuvering, and libelous claims and counterclaims. But British economic and military superiority soon made it advantageous to for Chinese to convert:

"Out of a total population of over four hundred million, only a tiny fraction of rural Chinese in the 1890s had ever seen a white man. Villagers were by nature open and friendly toward strangers, but in times of crisis there was a dread of foreign things. ...

"By 1870, some two hundred fifty Catholic missionaries could claim a Chinese flock of four hundred thousand. The three hundred fifty Protestant missionaries, who spent the greater part of their time quarreling among themselves, could claim only six thousand converts. ... Missionaries forbade their converts to take part in any form of ancestor worship or to contribute financially to rituals and festivals that in a village were the only distraction from a life of toil. This set Chinese Christians apart and increased the burden on everyone else. Anxious to save souls and to keep account books, missionaries often were satisfied with converts who were the dregs of society - freeloaders referred to contemptuously by Chinese as 'Rice Christians' [since they received free rice if they converted] - and uncharitably demanded preferential treatment for them in lawsuits and disputes over land.

"At Ningpo, nearly all the Protestant Chinese converts were in the direct employ of the missionaries who had 'converted' them. By professing Christianity they got jobs and job security.

"By the 1890s resentment of these Rice Christians and their missionary sponsors was being deliberately provoked by clever, widely distributed anti-Christian propaganda ... [which] accused Christians of indulging in incest, sodomy, emasculating little boys, and using magic to accomplish perverted ends. ... Stimulated in this way, antiforeign and anti-Christian fury grew as the nineteenth century ended; missionaries and converts were attacked and murdered and mission property destroyed. During the 1890s anti-missionary outbreaks occurred in all eighteen provinces. Missionaries were accused of being spies, profiteering merchants, and hedonists. ...

"Great Britain threatened to intervene militarily if the Chinese government failed to punish the regional officials taken to be responsible. Peking gave in and sacked and degraded the governor of Szechwan and six other mandarins, executed thirty-one peasants, and imprisoned or banished thirty-eight others. Edicts were issued making it clear that further attacks on foreign missionaries, their churches, and their Chinese converts would not be tolerated. Other edicts warned local officials that they would be held responsible if there were further incidents. The message was loud and clear that from here on Christians would be given imperial protection. ...

"The result in places like rural western Shantung was that local officials became reluctant to risk any confrontation with missionaries or their flocks, and there was a flood of conversions by Chinese who were seeking missionary protection from local enemies or trying to avoid prosecution by local officials for a wide range of crimes. Whole bandit communities put themselves under the protection of Catholic priests. Village rivals facing lawsuits had themselves baptized in order to gain legal advantage in court. Recognizing a golden opportunity for more conversions, Catholic priests defended converts willy-nilly, pressing their cases before government officials, or had pressure applied in provincial capitals and even through the bishop to legations in Peking. Every demonstration of Christian influence attracted more converts, many of them bad characters. Shantung's governor, General Li Ping-heng, called them 'weed people.' A vicious cycle began in which individual missionaries were encouraged to abuse their temporal power to increase their heavenly dividends."

delanceyplace.com 9/7/11 - orwell versus huxley

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - two competing visions of the future from British authors George Orwell (1903-1950) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). Though it came 17 years later, Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 is better known; however, Huxley's Brave New World has proven more relevant. Written in the shadow of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, 1984 shows a world ruled by an oligarchical dictatorship with perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind control. Set in 2540 AD, Brave New World was published in 1932 and began as a parody of H. G. Wells' optimistic and utopian novel Men Like Gods. Neil Postman contrasted the two visions in the foreword to his 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death:

"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and [Orwell's] prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

"Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

"Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

"This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."

delanceyplace.com 9/6/11 - genius at manipulation

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:45:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - William McKinley, Jr. (1843-1901), the 25th President of the United States, was viewed by most contemporaries as amiable but weak. A native of Ohio who led the U.S. into the Spanish-American War, historians have posthumously credited him with forging the Republican coalition that dominated national politics for thirty years - through the presidency of Herbert Hoover. He was assassinated by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz and succeeded by his vice president Theodore Roosevelt:

"To most of his contemporaries, William McKinley was an insoluble puzzle. Men never knew quite what to make of him either as a man or as a leader. What were his political intentions? Nobody could say for certain. Did he even have any intentions of his own? A good many people doubted it. McKinley's public utterances - vague, windy, and oracular - never disclosed his real aims. His actions - ambiguous and self-contradictory - never quite revealed his policies.

"Those who visited him at the White House came away impressed with his sweetness of temper, his soothing disposition, his willingness to please, to placate, to agree, but they saw few signs of personal force or deeply held conviction. On the whole, men thought him amiably weak. It was the obvious conclusion to draw from cautious speeches, ambiguous actions, and the personal manner of the professional charmer who shrinks from giving offense. Since the President never sought to correct such impressions, men could well conclude that he was not only weak but supine. Few American Presidents were so widely regarded in their own time as the instrument of other men's visions, the tool of other men's ambitions, or the victim of sheer, inescapable circumstance.

"A few men knew better. One of them was McKinley's future secretary of state, John Hay, [as a young man he had been Abraham Lincoln's private secretary], who wrote to Henry Adams shortly after visiting McKinley during the 1896 election campaign: 'I was more struck than ever by his mask. It is a genuine Italian ecclesiastical face of the fifteenth century. And there are idiots who think [campaign manager and U.S. Senator] Mark Hanna will run him.' Hay's physiognomical insight was particularly keen. The White House has rarely known a President more devious, crafty, or subtle than the amiable, mild-mannered McKinley and few so adept at getting what he wanted. He was, remarked Adams, 'easily first in genius for manipulation.' That was exactly the truth. McKinley was a political genius, and manipulation was the mode of his genius. Among American Presidents he is the supreme example of the political wirepuller, the leader who gets things done without ever seeming to lead.

"If contemporaries never knew McKinley's intentions it was because the President never candidly avowed them to anyone. If he seemed to be the victim of events, it was because he was master of the fait accompli, the patient contriver of circumstances which, as he would ruefully announce, gave him no choice but to do exactly what he privately wanted. Although he kept his goals secret, McKinley was superbly adept at letting those who had to divine them divine them correctly and at getting them to do what he wanted without ever openly declaring that he wanted it. Inevitably the men McKinley bent to his purposes often stole the limelight from the President, but McKinley cared nothing for the limelight. 'He was a man of great power,' his secretary of war Elihu Root recalled after his death, 'because he was absolutely indifferent to credit ... but McKinley always had his way.'

"McKinley's lack of personal vanity - a lack bordering on shamelessness - was his greatest political asset. Few Presidents would have tolerated as McKinley did so complacently the insulting charge of being Mark Hanna's puppet. McKinley, however, had every reason to tolerate the insult for Hanna, in fact, was the President's front man, the one who did all his political dirty work and who suffered all the consequent abuse. During the 1896 election campaign Democrats brutally assailed Hanna while 'the Major' went through the campaign virtually uncriticized. If McKinley appeared weak, vacillating, and passive, the tool of others and the slave of circumstance, it was because he wished to appear that way. The appearance was a political necessity. In order to get what he wanted, McKinley had to go to great lengths to deny that he wanted anything at all."

delanceyplace.com 9/1/11 - a safe place to fail: second city theater

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - the 1959 opening in Chicago of Second City theater, which made ensemble comedy magic by combining very high standards with a willingness to let its actors fail, and which became the training ground for such comic and theater luminaries as Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Mike Myers, John Candy, Chris Farley, Gilda Radner, Alan Arkin, Bonnie Hunt, Bill Murray, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, Amy Sedaris and many more:

"America was in the midst of a comedy revolution when Bernard Sahlins, Howard Alk, and Paul Sills conspired in 1959 to open a bohemian coffeehouse for recreational smoking, erudite discourse, and satirical theater. Considering the times, it seemed destined for success - or miserable failure. ... In addition to sharing a vision for what would become the Second City, another thing all three had in common was a diploma from the elite University of Chicago. ...

"Little did they know that the result of their labors would become an instant hit. Sahlins, who'd produced plays in 1956 at the handsome and historic Studebaker Theatre on South Michigan Avenue, initially invested six thousand dollars, and the new organization's defiant handle was reportedly conjured by Alk in ironic response to a snotty 1952 New Yorker magazine feature-turned-book by A. J. Liebling (Chicago: The Second City). ... While tough times ahead would continue to cause concern, the beginning was more auspicious than anyone had imagined. From night one, even as the budget carpet was still being installed, there were crowds in the lobby and lines out the door to witness the birth of a sensation. ...

SHELDON PATINKIN, former manager and director and current artistic consultant:

There was more of a willingness to fail then, because we all knew that was the only way you were going to find the good stuff. That's true of Chicago theater. You can fail in Chicago and still get work.

ALAN ARKIN, cast member:

First and most important, Second City gave me a place to go; it gave me a place to function. That was the main thing. And the second most important thing, which was very, very close to the first, was that it gave us a place to fail. Which doesn't exist in this civilization anymore. There is no place to fail anymore. And failing at something is crucial. You don't learn from anything unless you fail. And we were not only allowed to fail, but almost encouraged to take chances every night onstage. We knew that twenty, thirty, sometimes forty percent of what we were doing wasn't going to work, and Sills never said anything about it, Bernie never said anything about it, and the audience didn't mind. They knew that two things would fail and the next thing would be glorious.

BOB DISHY, cast member:

[Director Paul Sills] felt a moral responsibility to the choices that you make in an improv. ... He was also pragmatic, and he knew he had to do shows. But he was pained, physically pained, by what he considered cheap laughs. I mean, they would drive him up the wall. He'd come backstage and yell, "Stop it! What are you doing?!" Because he had these high standards, which was great. I found it so enlightening.

BONNIE HUNT, cast member:

It definitely humbles you, because there are times when you go out there and you fail and you've got to brush yourself off and start all over again. It's kind of like being a Cubs fan. I think what I learned at Second City was that it was okay to take risks, to fall flat on my face and get back up and learn about myself. And I definitely learned to embrace the honesty of my own vulnerability.

TINA FEY, cast member:

Being in that company, in some ways you lose your fear of failure. Because there are always nights in that set when you're developing a show where everything tanks, or where you're just bombing, and you come out the other side of it, and you survive it. And that's such a great thing to get rid of - that fear of failure.

BILL MURRAY, cast member:

It's given many great performers their start, but more importantly, it's killed thousands of barely talented people and it's put them to death, and they're now doing the jobs they're built for. It's because they couldn't meet the rugged standards."

delanceyplace.com 9/2/11 - red carpet for black players

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - one of the great American stories that has been told and told again, including on these pages, is about when Jackie Robinson was signed by Branch Rickey and broke the color barrier in baseball in 1947. However, there is almost always an untold part of this story. In the mid-1940s, the Mexican League, led by legendary multi-millionaire owner Jorge Pasquel, started aggressively signing black American baseball players. This put pressure on American team owners to move on this issue or lose an opportunity for the better results associated with these players, since Jorge Pasquel's motivation for signing these players was the same as Branch Rickey's - to win ballgames and increase revenues for his team:

"When the black players started to play in Mexico, they were often followed on the street by curious Mexicans who had not seen people of color before. 'I saw them as extraordinary, almost extraterrestrials who came to play here,'recalled baseball Mexican historian Jaime Cervantes, who used to go to games in the forties with his father, Leopoldo, who played for the Puebla team in the Mexican League. 'We saw the black players as gods. We sought their friendship. We wanted them to recognize us and to talk to us. They were fleeing from racism and sought refuge here. I have fond memories of when I was a child and saw the black players play.' The African American players found a familiar sight in Mexico: as in the Negro Leagues, the fans dressed up to go to the baseball games, considering them as much a social event as a sporting event. ...

"Jorge realized that the black players had to be treated better than most. They had to have a nice home, a nice car. That way society [perceives them to have status and] automatically changes its attitude. ... Pasquel encouraged the players to bring their families to Mexico. He either gave them housing allowances or provided them with apartments. Delores Dandridge recalled that Pasquel provided her father, Ray, with a six-room apartment overlooking Chapultepec Park, the Mexico City equivalent of a Park Avenue apartment overlooking New York's Central Park. Pasquel provided a tutor for the children and a maid to do the housework. ...

"[But even in Mexico there were occasional problems.] When Sug Cornelius returned in 1940, he was denied a room at the hotel where he had stayed during the previous season in Mexico City. 'I asked the hotel manager why, and he said, 'Well, you know, we have a lot of tourists come here, and the whites say they don't live in the same hotel with you in the United States.' I told him, 'If that's the way you want it, that's okay.' [Pasquel] got me a nice apartment.' ...

"Willie Wells, in an interview in Mexico City with Wendell Smith of the African American weekly Pittsburgh Courier, said:

" 'I came back to play ball for [the] Veracruz [team] because I have a better future in Mexico than in the States. Not only do I get more money playing here, but I live like a king. I am not faced with the racial problem in Mexico. ...

"I mean that we are heroes here, not just ballplayers. I was going to stay in the States and play for Newark, but I think a ballplayer, or any workingman, should take advantage of better opportunities. I didn't quit Newark and join some other team in the States. I quit and left the country.

"I've found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. I was branded a Negro in the States and had to act accordingly. Everything I did, including playing ball, was regulated by my color. Well, here in Mexico I am a man. I can go as far in baseball as I am capable of going. I can live where I please and will encounter no restrictions of any kind because of my race.'

"Catcher Bill Cash, who played for the Mexico City Red Devils, shared Wells' views on Mexico. 'The fans loved us there and treated us like kings,' he said. 'It didn't matter what your color was. Mexico and Canada were the two places where there was no racial discrimination. You'd be thirsty in Mexico and see a water fountain and look above it for the 'White Only' sign and there was none. Water never tasted so good.'

delanceyplace.com 8/31/11 - rapid growth means death

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - prior to the most recent times, rapid growth in a given community's population quickly imperiled that community because their land and resources could only support a limited population. Therefore those communities had strategies for limiting growth - infanticide, emigration, and changing the age of marriage - among others:

"There are many reasons why an individual or a community might choose to migrate and settle in a new territory. Herodotus tells the story of the inhabi- tants of Thera - the modern Greek island of Santorini - who, after seven years of disastrous harvests, decided that all they could do was to draw lots to select a proportion of the population to be sent overseas to found a new colony. When the spirit of the frightened exiles failed and they turned their ship back to the island, stones were thrown at them to keep them from landing. The approach of famine was one compelling reason for emigration.

"But there were many other reasons for mobility. The Phoenicians from Tyre who set up a trading colony on the island of Gadir (Cadiz) just off the coast of Andalucia around 800 BC were most likely motivated by a desire to benefit from the proceeds of trade with the metal-rich Tartessians living on the adjacent mainland, while the Irish Christian monks who sailed to Iceland in the eighth century AD did so simply to seek solitude in a deserted place, the better to commune with their god.

"Many anecdotes can be told about human mobility, reflecting a bewildering variety of motives - religious calling, an innate desire to explore, trade for financial gain: all are familiar in the modern world. But the overriding imperative, then as now, was the desire for adequate personal space and the resources to support a desired lifestyle.

"All animal populations are governed by basic biological rules, as Thomas Malthus long ago recognized. A population occupying a defined environment, left to breed in an uninhibited fashion, is likely at first to increase in size exponentially. But as the population reaches the holding capacity of the environment they inhabit, the rate of growth will rapidly decrease until the numbers remain steady below that holding capacity. In practice, the holding capacity may at first be exceeded resulting in stress and disruption to the social fabric before the level is adjusted.

"To control the growth of population societies may introduce a number of constraints. Birth rate can be reduced in a variety of ways, from raising the age of marriage to infanticide. Warfare is another effective way to reduce surplus population, and since warfare seems to be endemic it has probably served as one of the principal regulators throughout time. Another mechanism, reflected in Herodotus's story of Thera, is emigration and colonization in which a segment of the population moves off to find a new ecological niche to settle.

"The holding capacity of a particular environment may also change. The introduction of more effective means of production and distribution through improved technology allows for a larger population. In Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a rapidly increasing population was accommodated through a range of agricultural improvements, including the more efficient overwintering of livestock made possible by the introduction of the turnip. Later it was new technology heralding the Industrial Revolution - inventions such as the blast furnace and steam power - that enabled population growth to be sustained.

"Conversely, holding capacity can be reduced, temporarily or permanently, by natural catastrophe or long-term environmental decline. The potato famine in Ireland in the early nineteenth century caused not only a high death rate through disease and malnutrition but also mass emigration. In 1841 the Irish population was over eight million. Ten years later a million had died and another million had emigrated, mainly to America. Thereafter the momentum of emigration continued over the course of a hundred years, reducing the Irish population to about half its pre-famine level."

delanceyplace.com 8/30/11 - to be funny - go for what's real

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:05:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the lessons of a veteran television situation comedy writer on what to do if a script isn't funny enough. In this case, the writer is star producer, director, playwright and comedy writer Walter Bennett, whose work includes writing for The Cosby Show and producing The Steve Harvey Show. Here in an interview with authors Peter Desberg and Jeffrey David, he also reflects on "writer's rooms":

Desberg: "How do you go about making stuff funnier when you get feedback that you need more laughs?"

Bennett: "First I' d look at what the original joke is, and a lot of times when it doesn't work, it's because there's no surprise in the joke; it's expected. If it's not funny, it's usually because it's not the worst thing that can happen. There's something worse that could happen. [You need to make it so that] you can't get any worse than this. Let me give you an example: 'Well, the camera fell over.' And I go, 'Wow, now that's bad,' - but where did it fall? It's not specific enough [to be as funny as it could be]. And a lot of times, it will be something specific that plays into the fear of your character that you've built up. You can get comedy out of that.

Desberg: "How did you get schooled in comedy writing?"

Bennett: "My first school in comedy writing was television. Watching Norman Lear at the time Good Times was on, and Maude, it was the heyday of half-hour comedy. I used to think of half-hour sitcoms as a play. Whatever I thought was funny I would put down on paper. ... And a lot of it I learned along the way. It started to turn into a curiosity because I started to get my own books on comedy. In theater, for some reason, drama is king, and you're trying to be Oscar Wilde. I was drama all the way to Yale. I was known for writing drama and social criticism. And then I wrote a piece in New York called Snapshots: An American Slide Show, and it was done as part of a performance at Lincoln Center and Alice Tully Hall. I had to direct this thing, and I just said it was social commentary. I thought it was kind of funny, but I think the worst thing for a writer to hear is laughter. Live laughter.

Davis: "Did Norman Lear mentor you?"

Bennett: "No, actually we worked together for a brief time on the show 704 Hauser. I've spent time with Bill Cosby. Cosby said, 'Let me help you out here.' And so he would talk about his take on comedy. I remember what he told me. He said, 'Don't go for the joke' - that's what he kept saying. 'Don't go for the joke. Go for what's real. If it's real, you can always build off something that's real. But it's more difficult to try to build off a joke, because that's not real. And everybody laughs because they relate to it - it's something real to them.' A problem I had in the beginning was trying to emulate a joke I'd seen on television, and it wasn't very good. But when I started to learn it's like Cosby was saying - it's real, it's real, keep these people real - you can keep coming back to the well."

Davis: "What are your feelings are about writers' rooms, and the politics of a room?

Bennett: "I like the writers' room; I hate the politics. When I first went to The Cosby Show, I had never written for a sitcom - never. In fact, it was embar- rassing. I didn't know how a sitcom script lined up on the page. I only knew plays and screenplays. When I got the job, I told one of the writers' assistants, 'Can you get me a script? Between you and me, I don't know what one looks like.' And they laughed [because they worked through improvisation more than scripts]. What they said to me was, 'Do you know what it's like to be at a table?' And this is my interview, and I go, 'Ah ... yeah, yeah ... no, no, no ... ' It's writers who sit around the table and they explained it to me. And I went, 'You mean like improv, you mean working off somebody.' And they went 'Yeah.' And they hired me. I really loved working off the other writers."

Bennett: "Another anecdote from a writer's room: You make an incredible pitch, and everyone goes, 'Oh, no, that's not it,' and then someone else says the exact same thing that you said, and someone says, 'That was brilliant,' and then you say, 'I just said that.' [And they respond] 'Oh come on now, let's not get that way.' "

delanceyplace.com 8/29/11 - americans hate the british

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the 1890s, Americans still had an active hate for the British. The crushing hardship of the Depression of 1893, which lasted most of the decade, only added to that hate since the British were the leading bankers of the era and were thus assumed to be culprits of these economic difficulties. This provided the politicians of Washington, especially President Grover Cleveland, a convenient scapegoat - and since a president has more latitude on foreign affairs, it also provided a reason for wanting a confrontation with Britain - over a Venezuelan border dispute:

[Editor's note: the long-standing American ill-will toward Britain was part of what made America's entry into World War I on the British side a mere twenty years later surprising.]

"Personally, the President had never been a warmonger, a jingo, or an expansionist. Consistent with his belief in minimal government, he had long adhered to America's traditionally modest foreign policy. ... The President, however, was a desperate man. ... Cleveland's power in the [his own Dem- ocratic] party had become virtually nil. ... In the aftermath of the 1894 elections, [the midterm elections in which his party had suffered major losses], Cleveland was prepared to sacrifice the scruples of a lifetime and foment a war crisis with England. ...

"Cleveland took the first public step toward crisis with England on December 3, 1894, in his annual message to Congress. In the message the President pledged himself to resolve by diplomacy an ongoing dispute between Venezuela and Britain, a dispute over the boundary of British Guiana that had sputtered on and off for half a century. ...

"Cleveland's decision to intervene in the Venezuela dispute was a sharp reversal of policy. A year before Cleveland had felt no obligation to help settle Venezuela's quarrel with Britain. The United States had no stake whatever in the dispute, no treaty obligations to fulfill, no national interest to serve, no threatened honor to uphold. Moreover the Venezuelan government, a corrupt dictatorship, had ulterior motives of its own for stirring up the dispute, which was as tawdry as it was tangled. ...

"Since Cleveland had never been a warmonger, the press at first took little notice of his pledge to 'induce' a major power to do what it had adamantly refused to do. The lame-duck Democratic Congress, however, took the President's cue with alacrity. On January 10, 1895, a Georgia Democrat introduced into the House a joint resolution urging the President to secure arbitration of the Anglo-Venezuelan boundary dispute. By February 22 it had passed both houses of Congress unanimously, an encouraging response to the President's message. Trouble with Britain was the one species of international wrangling that was certain at any time to win the electorate's approval.

"By the end of 1894 Britain had become a target particularly well suited to Cleveland's purpose. ... Among rural voters, hatred of the British had grown singularly intense. To the nation's angry farmers, it was British gold, British capital, and British influence which seemed to block every effort at reform. Time and again they were warned that some agrarian reform or other would frighten British investors, compelling them to withdraw their capital from America and bringing our economy to a halt.

"That anger the Democrats had been exploiting for some time. 'Shall we bow the knee to England?' Democratic Senator Francis Cockrell of Missouri had declaimed. ... Other Democrats took up the cry. 'It is time we act for ourselves and not be consulting England,' asserted Representative William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, a rising young politician who made it one of his leading themes on the stump. 'War with England,' declared William 'Coin' Harvey, would be the most 'just war ever waged by man.' War with England, said Nevada's Republican Senator William Stewart ... would 'rid the country of the English bank rule.' Blaming British influence for the nation's economic ills, millions of rural voters were ready to regard war with England as an economic panacea in itself. This was the sentiment that Cleveland hoped to exploit. His diplomacy now proceeded steadily down the path toward war.

"[After rebukes, ultimatums, and counter-rebukes led America and Britain to the brink of war, Britain unexpectedly faced a new menace from Imperial Germany regarding South Africa. Because of this], Lord Salisbury was per- suaded by his cabinet on January 11 to make himself agreeable to America and drop the dispute over Venezuela's boundary. A completely unpredictable occurrence had put an end to the crisis."

delanceyplace.com 8/26/11 - "stocks are a zit compared to bonds"

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - as told in The Big Short, Michael Lewis's chronicle of the sub-prime mortgage debacle, Steve Eisman and Vincent Daniel were two brilliant investment managers who were among the very few to figure out the problem early on. Along the way, they discovered that the stock market (also called the equity market) was small and relatively well regulated compared to the bond market (also called the fixed income market) - which was huge, sprawling and had eluded serious regulation:

"In the fog of the first eighteen months of running his own business, Eisman had an epiphany, an identifiable moment when he realized he'd been missing something obvious. Here he was, trying to figure out which stocks to pick, but the fate of the stocks depended increasingly on the bonds. As the subprime mortgage market grew, every financial company was, one way or another, exposed to it. 'The fixed income world dwarfs the equity world,' he said. 'The equity world is like a fucking zit compared to the bond market.' Just about every major Wall Street investment bank was effectively run by its bond departments. ... Ever since the 1980s, when the leading bond firm, Salomon Brothers, had made so much money that it looked as if it was in a different industry than the other firms, the bond market had been where the big money was made. 'It was the golden rule,' said Eisman. 'The people who have the gold make the rules.' Most people didn't understand how what amounted to a two-decade boom in the bond market had overwhelmed everything else. Eisman certainly hadn't. Now he did. ...

"[By] February 2006, Steve Eisman knew enough about the bond market to be wary, and [his colleague] Vincent Daniel knew enough to have decided that no one in it could ever be trusted. An investor who went from the stock market to the bond market was like a small, furry creature raised on an island without predators removed to a pit full of pythons. It was possible to get ripped off by the big Wall Street firms in the stock market, but you really had to work at it. The entire market traded on screens, so you always had a clear view of the price of the stock of any given company. The stock market was not only transparent but heavily policed. You couldn't expect a Wall Street trader to share with you his every negative thought about public companies, but you could expect he wouldn't work very hard to sucker you with outright lies, or blatantly use inside information to trade against you, mainly because there was at least a chance he'd be caught if he did. The presence of millions of small investors had politicized the stock market. It had been legislated and regulated to at least seem fair.

"The bond market, because it consisted mainly of big institutional investors, experienced no similarly populist political pressure. Even as it came to dwarf the stock market, the bond market eluded serious regulation. Bond salesmen could say and do anything without fear that they'd be reported to some authority. Bond traders could exploit inside information without worrying that they would be caught. Bond technicians could dream up ever more complicated securities without worrying too much about government regulation - one reason why so many derivatives had been derived, one way or another, from bonds. The bigger, more liquid end of the bond market - the market for U.S. Treasury bonds, for example - traded on screens, but in many cases the only way to determine if the price some bond trader had given you was even close to fair was to call around and hope to find some other bond trader making a market in that particular obscure security. The opacity and complexity of the bond market was, for big Wall Street firms, a huge advantage. The bond market customer lived in perpetual fear of what he didn't know. If Wall Street bond departments were increasingly the source of Wall Street profits, it was in part because of this: In the bond market it was still possible to make huge sums of money from the fear, and the ignorance, of customers."

delanceyplace.com 8/25/11 - the earth offers us only tiny amounts of water

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - only the tiniest fraction of all the earth's water is available to us as fresh liquid water, and control of rivers, more than oceans or lakes, has been the key to the advance of civilization:

"Despite Earth's superabundance of total water, nature endowed to mankind a surprisingly minuscule amount of accessible fresh liquid water that is indispensable to planetary life and human civilization. Only 2.5 percent of Earth's water is fresh. But two-thirds of that is locked away from man's use in ice caps and glaciers. All but a few drops of the remaining one-third is also inaccessible, or prohibitively expensive to extract, because it lies in rocky, underground aquifers - in effect, isolated underground lakes - many a half mile or more deep inside Earth's bowels. Such aquifers hold up to an estimated 100 times more liquid freshwater than exists on the surface. In all, less than three-tenths of 1 percent of total freshwater is in liquid form on the surface. The remainder is in permafrost and soil moisture, in the body of plants and animals, and in the air as vapor.

"One of the most striking facts about the world's freshwater is that the most widely accessed source by societies throughout history-rivers and streams-hold just six-thousandths of 1 percent of the total. Some societies have been built around the edges of lakes, which cumulatively hold some 40 times more than rivers. Yet lake water has been a far less useful direct resource to large civilizations because its accessible perimeters are so much smaller than riversides. Moreover, many are located in inhospitable frozen regions or mountain highlands, and three-fourths are concentrated in just three lake systems: Siberia's remote, deep Lake Baikal, North America's Great Lakes, and East Africa's mountainous rift lakes, chiefly Tanganyika and Nyasa. ...

"The minuscule, less than 1 percent total stock of accessible freshwater, however, is not the actual amount available to mankind since rivers, lakes, and shallow groundwater are constantly being replenished through Earth's desalinating water cycle of evaporation and precipitation - at any given moment in time, four-hundredths of 1 percent of Earth's water is in the process of being recycled through the atmosphere. Most of the evaporated water comes from the oceans and falls back into them as rain or snow. But a small, net positive amount of desalted, cleansed ocean water precipitates over land to renew its freshwater ecosystems before running off to the sea. Of that amount, civilizations since the dawn of history have had practical access only to a fraction, since two-thirds was rapidly lost in floods, evaporation, and directly in soil absorption, while a lot of the rest ran off in regions like the tropics or frozen lands too remote from large populations to be captured and utilized.

"Indeed, the dispersion of available freshwater on Earth is strikingly uneven. Globally, one-third of all streamflow occurs in Brazil, Russia, Canada, and the United States, with a combined one-tenth of the world's population. Semi-arid lands with one-third of world population, by contrast, get just 8 percent of renewable supply. Due to the extreme difficulty of managing such a heavy liquid - weighing 8.34 pounds per gallon, or over 20 percent more than oil - societies' fates throughout history have rested heavily on their capacity to increase supply and command over their local water resources. ...

"Almost everywhere civilization has taken root, man-made deforestation, water diversion, and irrigation schemes have produced greater desiccation, soil erosion, and the ruination of Earth's natural fertility to sustain plant life. "How societies respond to the challenges presented by the changing hydraulic conditions of its environment using the technological and organizational tools of its times is, quite simply, one of the central motive forces of history. ... Throughout history, wherever water resources have been increased and made most manageable, navigable, and potable, societies have generally been robust and long enduring. ... In every age, whoever gained control of the world's main sea-lanes or the watersheds of great rivers commanded the gateways of imperial power."

delanceyplace.com 8/24/11 - the decline of french cuisine

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - as reported by Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books, French cuisine is declining in its creativity and influence:

"The statistics tell much of the story: in 1960, there were 200,000 cafés in France, now there are about 30,000, an average of two closing every day; the French home meal a generation ago took 88 minutes to prepare, now it's 38 minutes; the great majority of French cheeses were unpasteurized in the 1950s, now only 10 per cent are made from raw milk; French family-owned wineries and farms have been going out of business at an alarming rate, and the pro- portion of the labor force employed in agriculture has dropped from 20 per cent in the 1960s to about 5 per cent today. And you surely have to give attention to some of the good things that have also eroded traditional foodways in France, as they have in many other countries: for example, slightly better pay for restaurant workers and the unshackling of women from the domestic kitchen. In Distinction (1979), Pierre Bourdieu addressed the declining 'taste for elaborate casserole dishes (pot-au-feu, blanquette, daube)' in terms of women's changing role in France, and also as an illustration of the concept of 'cultural capital'. Your food is supposed to get lighter as you move up in the world.

"The second most profitable national market for McDonald's is now France. The Great Satan of dietary mondialization is now woven into the fabric of French life and, while Au Revoir to All That: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisineauthor Michael Steinberger has no taste for fast-food malbouffe, he also has no time for the facile notion that this is a story about Americanization: 'The quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin' it - the architects of McDonald's strategy in France were French.' The French buy 'Les Big Macs' because they like them. McDonald's French executives have successfully argued that it is a French company, supplying emerging French needs, adjusting its facilities to French habits, and sourcing its beef, bread and condiments from impeccably French sources. One of McDonald's advertising campaigns posed the question 'D'où vient ton McDo?', since the company was happy to supply the answer.

"American and British foodies appear at times 'plus royaliste que le roi', reminding French food culture what it owes to the world and, specifically, to those whose lives were turned inside out by a French epiphany. Steinberger visited Philippe Alléosse, owner of perhaps the best cheese shop in Paris. Shopkeeper and foodie shared their alarm over the decline of raw-milk cheeses and the rise of industrial junk, and then Alléosse told Steinberger where he thought the blame lay: 'No French chefs come to visit here. We get foreign chefs, but no French chefs. The French think that good cheese is too expensive. It is the Americans and other foreigners who support quality. I have Americans coming into the store saying: "Philippe, you must continue, you must protect lait cru cheeses, you have the best métier in the world." I never hear that from French people.' Here, as elsewhere, the natural allies of terroir and Slow Food are the technologies of globalisation: the internet and the 747.

delanceyplace.com 8/23/11 - the revolutionary ideas of miletos

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - before Plato, Socrates and the Golden Age of Pericles in Athens, the center of both trade and innovative thought in the world was Miletos, situated on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey. What emerged at Miletos was truly revolutionary - civilization's first attempt to replace myths with rational thought. In Miletos, the first map of the world was likely drawn, and Hecataeus wrote the works that gave him claim as the father of both geography and history. Once jutting out into a wide bay fed by the river Menderes and surrounded by fine harbors, today the city is a gaunt ruin, isolated by the marshlands that have crept relentlessly seawards, a victim partly of changing sea levels and partly of erosion from the flanking hills left bare by overgrazing:

"From the early second millennium BC, the promontory of Miletos was the home of traders closely linked to the Minoan and, later, the Mycenaean world. Later foundation myths tell of Ionian Greeks from Athens settling there, probably as early as 1000 BC. By 700 BC a thriving Archaic city spread across the headland, soon to be adorned with temples to Dionysos, Artemis and Aphrodite, Demeter and Athena, and protected by a city wall. The prosperity of the city was based partly on a hinterland productive of wool and oil, but more on its highly favoured location as a route node linking the long overland trek from the east, via the valley of the river Menderes, to the coastal shipping lanes which embraced the east Mediterranean and extended northwards into the Black Sea and to the Pontic steppe. Through the port of Miletos goods and people flowed, and with the sailors and traders came knowledge. For those anxious to learn of the world there could hardly have been a better place to sit and listen.

"From about 600 BC, Miletos became a centre of vibrant scholarship - a place where thinkers attempted to counter the colourful mythical view of the world revolving around a pantheon of deities with a new rationalism based partly on observational science and partly on philosophy. The earliest of these remarkable men to whom we can give a name was Thales, active in the early decades of the sixth century. He is said to have visited and studied in Egypt and is credited with developing the belief that the world originated from water and would eventually return to water. His pupil Anaximander (c.610-545) further developed this idea of a primordial element. For him it was not water butapeiron, probably best interpreted as that which is spatially unlimited or boundless. The products of this matter - such as wetness, dryness, heat, cold - in paired opposites gave rise to the many worlds of the universe. Anaximander is also credited with producing the first map of the world, which he envisaged to be a disc standing on a column suspended in space in the centre of the universe. The third of this remarkable group was Anaximenes (c.6oo-526), who may have been a pupil of Anaximander. His view of cosmogony was that everything derived from air either by rarefaction, giving rise to fire, or by condensation, leading successively to wind, cloud, water, earth and stone. He was also the first philosopher to envisage a human soul, which he believed to be a component of air.

"The three Milesian philosophers brought about a profound change in thought in the early part of the sixth century - a revolution that was to set the scene for the growth of philosophy in Athens in the following centuries. While one can discern there the influences of Babylonian and Egyptian thought, what emerged at Miletos was truly revolutionary. It attempted to replace myths dependent on the machinations of the gods with rational thought.

"In this cradle of intellectual excitement, some time about 530 BC, Hecataeus was born. His two works, Histories and Journey Round the World, justify the claim that he was father of both history and geography. Neither work survives but several hundred fragments of the latter are quoted in the writings of his successors. The Journey was composed of itineraries through Europe and Asia along the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, but it also included additional material on Scythia and India. From the surviving scraps it is possible to reconstruct a map sketching the world as Hecataeus envisaged it. His sources were various. He appears to have made journeys of his own, but from his favoured position at Miletos he would also have been able to draw on the knowledge of travellers coming from far afield. According to Pliny the Elder, Miletos had been responsible for founding ninety colonies, many of them around the shores of the Black Sea. ... Hecataeus was careful to avoid anything that sounded like myth, priding himself that 'What I write here is the account that I believe to be true. For the stories told by the Greeks are many, and in my opinion ridiculous.' "

delanceyplace.com 8/22/11 - homogenizing america with "new age chains"

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 09:23:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the homogenization of America, the phenomenon that works to turn suburbs and medium-sized cities into placeless places, and comes currently, at least in part, from "new age chains." (Our readers will recall that the sameness of these suburbs was the subtext for Rod Serling's television series The Twilight Zone):

"Main Street in our minds - the ideal that many of us grew up with or got from postcards, black-and-white movies, and trips to Disneyland - starts with a brick church at one end of town and a granite bank at the other end. In between, there is a string of two- and three-story buildings, each looking a little different from the other and selling something a little different. All the shops have window displays and half-opened doors. They sell hometown newspapers andLife, penny candy and fresh-cut meat, clothes for Easter and the new school year, and chocolate shakes and Cherry Cokes paired with thin burgers and shoestring fries. The owners know their customers' names, sizes, and fashion sensibilities. In the middle of all of this is a quirky Woolworth's or a J. J. Newberry's - that's it for national stores.

"Sure, there is a heavy dose of nostalgia in these memories, but the downtowns of the past were different from today's upper-end downtowns. From Madison, Wisconsin, to Charleston, South Carolina, to Pasadena, California, you've got chains - not, in these places, McDonald's or Burger King, but 'new age chains,' as the Canadian activist-writer Naomi Klein calls them, like Starbucks, the Body Shop, and Qdoba Mexican Grill - outlets with small yet still distinctive signs, that use natural-looking products and color designs, and talk about community and corporate social responsibility. Along branded Main Streets from Maine to California, Einstein Bros. Bagels stands next to a Barnes & Noble next to a Banana Republic next to a Ben & Jerry's next to a Chili's next to a Starbucks.

"In the next town, there is a Gap (which owns Banana Republic), Cosi, Borders, the Body Shop, and Starbucks. Out on the highway, Applebee's saddles up next to Borders next to the mall with a Gap, Foot Locker, Children's Place, Sunglass Hut, and Build-a-Bear. Inside as well as in the parking lot, there is a Starbucks. Across the highway in another sea of parking spaces are The Home Depot, Petco, and Target with a Starbucks kiosk inside. The next town over has the same strip. It is not like there is one Main Street and then another anymore, or one commercial strip and then another. It is more like there is one single, low-slung, set-back Main Street of branded stores in America, and it gets repeated over and over again like a film trailer in a loop.

"There is a tipping point here, however. Too much sameness alarms, rather than reassures, many bobos (borgeois bohemians, a term coined by David Brooks to describe those who heirs to the yuppies want to be safely different and to be viewed as socially conscious) and creative class types; it cuts into their sense of individuality. '[C]hain stores,' Houston's Thomas L. Robinson lamented, 'have homogenized the landscape so that there are few remaining external clues [to] where you are.' Like others anxious about the most recent spread of 'generica,' Robinson blames Starbucks. This isn't entirely fair. Starbucks isn't the only chain out there, and the predictability it sells wouldn't work if people didn't want it. But Starbucks has grown so rapidly and spread so far, so fast, that is has replaced McDonald's and as the symbol for many of the newest and most troubling wave of homogenization."

delanceyplace.com 8/19/11 - how to keep robbing an ex-colony

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:44:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the 17th through the 19th centuries, an astonishing thing happened: the countries from the tiny continent of Europe took over almost the entire rest of the world and ran those lands as colonies. All of Africa save Ethiopia became colonies; all of the Americas, almost all of Asia (save China, which became a de facto colony after the opium wars). And while this was portrayed as an effort to lift up these savage countries ("the white man's burden"), it retarded the natural development of leadership within these countries and instead became an opportunity for daring entrepreneurs like Cecil Rhodes to build fortunes.

The benefits to the European governments that did the colonizing was far less evident though, and the colonies became a financial burden, which led to the unraveling of the British, French and other empires in the aftermath of two world wars. However, the great mineral wealth of these countries was too much for the businesses and entrepreneurs to leave behind, so as these countries were being "de-colonized", the sponsoring countries attempted to leave behind "friendly" leadership, even if the result was to continued to retard the development of organic leadership and democracy within those countries. Such was the case with the African nation of Gabon and the "Elf affair" which splashed across European headlines in the mid-1990s. One of the most fascinating aspects of this - which is relevant in understanding the selection of post-colonial dictators in numerous other countries - is that the French chose a dictator from a minority tribe to increase that dictator's dependency on French support:

"The so-called Elf affair scandal began in 1994 when U.S.-based Fairchild Corp. opened a commercial dispute with a French industrialist, triggering a stock exchange inquiry. Unlike in more adversarial Anglo-Saxon legal systems, where the prosecution jousts with the defense to produce a resolution, the investigating magistrate in France is more like an impartial detective inserted between the two sides. ... In this case Eva Joly, the Norwegian-born investigating magistrate, found that every time she investigated something new leads would emerge. She began receiving death threats: A miniature coffin was sent to her in the post, and on a raid of one business she found a Smith & Wesson revolver, fully loaded and pointed at the entrance. But she persisted: Other magistrates became involved, and as the extraordinary revelations began to accumulate, they began to discern the outlines of a gigantic system of corruption that connected the French state-owned oil company Elf Aquitaine with the French political, commercial, and intelligence establishments, via Gabon's deeply corrupt ruler Omar Bongo.

"Bongo's story is a miniature tale of what happened when France formally relinquished its colonies. As countries in Africa and elsewhere gained independence, the old beneficiaries of the French empire set up new ways to stay in control behind the scenes. Gabon became independent in 1960, just as it was starting to emerge as a promising new African oil frontier, and France paid it particular attention. France needed to install the right president: an authentic African leader who would be charismatic, strong, cunning, and, when it mattered, utterly pro-French. In Omar Bongo they found the perfect can- didate. He was from a tiny minority ethnic group and had no natural domestic support base, so he would have to rely on France to protect him. In 1967, aged just 32, Bongo became the world's youngest president, and for good measure France placed several hundred paratroopers in a barracks in Libreville, connected to one of his palaces by underground tunnels. This intimidating deterrent against coup plots proved so effective that by the time Bongo died in 2009, he was the world's longest-serving leader.

"In exchange for France's backing Bongo gave two things. First, he gave French companies almost exclusive access to his country's minerals, on highly preferential terms that were deeply unfair to the people of Gabon. The country became known as French companies' chasse gardee - their private hunting ground. But the second thing Bongo provided was more interesting. He allowed his country, through its oil industry, to become the African linchpin of the gigantic, secret Elf system - a vast web of global corruption secretly connecting the oil industries of former French African colonies with mainstream politics in metropolitan France, via Switzerland, Luxembourg, and other tax havens. Parts of Gabon's oil industry, Joly discovered as she dug deeper and deeper in Paris, had been serving as a giant slush fund: a pot of secret money outside the reach of French judicial authorities in which hundreds of millions of dollars were made available for the use of French elites. An African oil cargo would be sold, and the proceeds would split up into a range of bewildering accounts in tax havens, where they could be used to supply bribes and baubles for whatever [those] who controlled the system deemed fit."

delanceyplace.com 8/18/11 - children and lying

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - a controversial suggestion regarding children and lying:

"Researchers have found that the ability to tell fibs at the age of two is a sign of a fast developing brain and means they are more likely to have successful lives. They found that the more plausible the lie, the more quick witted they will be in later years and the better their ability to think on their feet. It also means that they have developed 'executive function' - the ability to invent a convincing lie by keeping the truth at the back of their mind.

" 'Parents should not be alarmed if their child tells a fib,' said Dr Kang Lee, director of the Institute of Child Study at Toronto University who carried out the research. 'Almost all children lie. Those who have better cognitive development lie better because they can cover up their tracks. They may make bankers in later life.' Lying involves multiple brain processes, such as integrating sources of information and manipulating the data to their advantage. It is linked to the development of brain regions that allow 'executive functioning' and use higher order thinking and reasoning.

"Dr Lee and his team tested 1,200 children aged two to 16 years old. A majority of the volunteers told lies but it is the children with better cognitive abilities who can tell the best lies. At the age of two, 20 per cent of children will lie. This rises to 50 per cent by three and almost 90 per cent at four. The most deceitful age, they discovered, was 12, when almost every child tells lies. The tendency starts to fall away by the age of 16, when it is 70 per cent. As adulthood approaches, young people learn instead to use the less harmful 'white lies' that everyone tells to avoid hurting people's feelings.

"Researchers say there is no link between telling fibs in childhood and any tendency to cheat in exams or to become a fraudster later in life. Nor does strict parenting or a religious upbringing have any impact. Dr Lee said that catching your children lying was not a bad thing but should be exploited as a 'teachable moment'. 'You shouldn't smack or scream at your child but you should talk about the importance of honesty and the negativity of lying,' he told the Sunday Times. 'After the age of eight the opportunities are going to be very rare.'

"The research team invited younger children - one at a time - to sit in a room with hidden cameras. A soft toy was placed behind them. When the researcher briefly left the room, the children were told not to look. In nine out of ten cases cameras caught them peeking. But when asked if they had looked, they almost always said no. They tripped themselves up when asked what they thought the toy might be. One little girl asked to place her hand underneath a blanket that was over the toy before she answered the question. After feeling the toy but not seeing it, she said: 'It feels purple so it must be Barney.' Dr Lee, who caught his son Nathan, three, looking at the toy, said: 'We even had cameras trained on their knees because we thought their legs would fidget if they were telling a lie, but it isn't true.'

"Older children were [given] a test paper but were told they must not look at the answers printed on the back. Some of the questions were easy, such as who lives in the White House. But the children who looked at the back gave the printed answer 'Presidius Akeman' to the bogus question 'Who discovered Tunisia?' When asked how they knew this, some said they learned it in a history class."

delanceyplace.com 8/17/11 - molybdenum, tungsten and war

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - molybdenum and tungsten. A key German advantage inWorld War I was Big Bertha, a forty-three ton gun which could fire a 16-inch, 2,200 pound shell nine miles. However, after a few days of firing, the twenty-two foot steel barrel would be useless since the iron in steel has a low melting point. The solution? Molybdenum from America in World War I and tungsten from supposedly neutral Portugal in World War II:

"The famous Krupp armament company found a recipe for strengthening steel: spiking it with molybdenum. Molybdenum ... could withstand the excessive heat because it melts at 4,750°F, thousands of degrees hotter than iron, the main metal in steel.

"Back in the trenches, the Germans were soon blazing away at the French andBritish with a second generation of 'moly steel' guns. But Germany soon faced another huge Bertha setback - it had no supply of molybdenum and risked running out. In fact, the only known supplier was a bankrupt, nearly abandoned mine on Bartlett Mountain in Colorado.

"Before World War I, a local had laid claim to Bartlett upon discovering veins of ore that looked like lead or tin. Those metals would have been worth at least a few cents per pound, but the useless molybdenum he found cost more to mine than it fetched, so he sold his mining rights to one Otis King. ... Always enterprising, King adopted a new extraction technique ... and quickly liberated fifty-eight hundred pounds of pure molybdenum - which more or less ruined him. Those nearly three tons exceeded the yearly world demand for molybdenum by 50 percent, which meant King hadn't just flooded the market, he'd drowned it. Noting at least the novelty of King's attempt, the U.S. government mentioned it in a mineralogical bulletin in 1915.

"Few noticed the bulletin except for a behemoth international mining company based in Frankfurt, Germany, with a U.S. branch in New York. According to one contemporary account, Metallgesellschaft had smelters, mines, refineries, and other 'tentacles' all over the world. As soon as the company directors ... read about King's molybdenum, they mobilized and ordered their top man in Colorado, Max Schott, to seize Bartlett Mountain. ...

"King had a dim idea what Molly did in Germany, but he was about the only non-German in Europe or North America who did. Not until the British captured German arms in 1916 and reverse-engineered them by melting them down did the Allies discover the wundermetall. ... The United States didn't enter World War I until 1917, so it had no special reason to monitor Metallgesellschaft's subsidiary in New York, especially considering its patriotic name, American Metal. When the U.S. government began asking questions around 1918, American Metal claimed that it legally owned the mine, since the harried Otis King had sold it to Schott for a paltry $40,000. It also admitted that ... it just happened to ship all that molybdenum to Germany. The feds quickly froze Metallgesellschaft's U.S. stock and took control of Bartlett Mountain. Sadly, those efforts came too late to disable Germany's Big Berthas. As late as 1918, Germany used molysteel guns to shell Paris from the astonishing distance of seventy-five miles. ...

"[One world war later], Nazi Germany coveted tungsten for making machinery and armor-piercing missiles, and its lust for [it] surpassed even its lust for looted gold, which Nazi officials happily bartered for tungsten. And who were the Nazis' trading partners? ... It was supposedly neutral Portugal whose tungsten fed the wolfish appetite of the German kriegwerks. ...

"Proving his worth as a former professor of economics, [Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio] Salazar leveraged his country's near monopoly on the metal (90 percent of Europe's supply) into profits 1,000 percent greater than peacetime levels. ...

"Tungsten is one of the hardest metals known, and adding it to steel made for excellent drill bits and saw heads. Plus, even modest-sized missiles tipped with tungsten - so-called kinetic energy penetrators-could take down tanks. The ... Nazi regime spent its entire tungsten reserve by 1941, at which point the Fuehrer himself got involved. Hitler ordered his ministers to grab as much tungsten as the trains across conquered France could carry ...

"Even stalwart Britain couldn't be bothered about the tungsten that was helping to cut down its lads. Prime Minister Winston Churchill privately referred to Portugal's tungsten trade as a 'misdemeanor,' and ... added that Salazar was 'quite right' to trade tungsten with Britain's avowed enemies. ...

" Salazar ... played the Axis and Allies brilliantly with vague promises, secret pacts, and stalling tactics that kept the tungsten trains chugging. He had increased the price of his country's one commodity from $1,100 per ton in 1940 to $20,000 in 1941, and he'd banked $170 million in three frenzied years of speculation. Only after running out of excuses did Salazar institute a full tungsten embargo against the Nazis on June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day, by which point the Allied commanders were too preoccupied (and disgusted) to punish him. I believe it was Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind who said that fortunes can be made only during the building up or tearing down of an empire, and Salazar certainly subscribed to that theory. In the so-called wolfram war, the Portuguese dictator had the last lycanthropic laugh."

delanceyplace.com 8/16/11 - writing the script for animal house

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:31:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the movie Animal House, which became the highest grossing comedy in history when it was released in 1978 and set the comedic tone for a generation. Based largely on the fraternity experiences of Chris Miller at Dartmouth in the early 1960s, the anarchic tone of his fraternity (and generation) had initially been set by the disillusionment of Korean War veterans returning to attend college in the 1950s. The movie was the first venture into film for National Lampoon, and young producer Ivan Reitman gave the script writing assignment to Harold Ramis, who later gained fame inGhostbusters and Stripes and himself directed such movies as Groundhog Dayand Caddyshack. Ramis was joined in his scriptwriting duties by Doug Kenney and Chris Miller. For all the chaos of the movie, the scriptwriting was the result of a disciplined three month process in a New York office building. Here is Ramis's recollection:

"Faced with the assigned material, I looked for a unifying setting and theme, and it was at that point that Anne, my wife at the time, said, 'Why don't you write a college movie?' In fact, I had had some extraordinary experiences at Washington University in St. Louis; I joined a fraternity and lived for two years in the Zeta Beta Tau house and then another two years in an off-campus apartment.

"What characterized my college years, 1962 to 1967, was the dramatic shift in mood and focus that began with the Kennedy assassination and continued through the onslaught of the free speech movement, the civil rights struggle, and the anti-war movement, all fueled and somewhat intensified by what I call a 'national voluntary drug-testing program.' In that period, fraternities were becoming increasingly marginalized as students converted their anarchic energy to legitimate political protest and activism, and the freeform social experiments of countercultural lifestyles like communes and collectives. In that new context, the old Greek system made less and less sense, and the film treatment I wrote attempted to describe that shift. I called it 'Freshman Year,' but when I submitted it to [National Lampoon publisher] Matty Simmons and Ivan, it was clear that nobody liked it enough to move forward. What we all recognized was that it lacked the spirit and hard comic edge of the Lampoon, so at that point I suggested working with a Lampoon editor, Doug Kenney, Harvard Lampoon alum and one of the founding partners of National Lampoon.

"Doug was a Harvard graduate from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and the Lampoon's leading cornie authority on puberty and adolescence. He had edited and compiled Lampoon's highly successful high school yearbook parody and had authored two classic Lampoon pieces, First Lay Comics and First High Comics, elements of which later found their way into the screenplay for Animal House....

"Enter Chris Miller, the lanky, good-natured Connecticut looking gentile whose boundless enthusiasm for the golden age of fraternity life instantly put us on the right track. Doug and Chris were Lampoon colleagues, and the three of us bonded quickly. What followed was an initial three-month period of forty-hour weeks on the eleventh floor of the Lampoon building at Fifty-ninth and Madison, bankers' hours spent totally debriefing each other on the American college experience. Working with Chris's treasure trove of published Adelphian Lodge stories, Doug's Harvard experiences, and my own fraternity days at Washington University, we compiled a virtual database of every funny thing that ever happened to any of us; every distinctive character we'd known; all the extraordinary and outlandish things we'd heard about fraternity life from our fathers, uncles, brothers, and cousins; and, finally, every single college myth we could remember hearing. Furthermore we looked back and discussed classic gang comedy, from Our Gang to Archie comics, identifying relevant archetypes for our emerging narrative. But what galvanized all our thinking right from the start was the term animal house, not just as a title but as the organizing thematic element from which everything else flowed. ...

"What didn't make it into the film were some of the really hard-core events, true stories that the producers and executives at Universal found too shocking or disgusting to include in a film intended for general release, even with its R rating. In fact, we were told that when Ned Tannen, the president of Universal, read the script for the first time, he appeared disturbed and said, 'I don't get it. These are the heroes?' Reassured by the studio's younger executives, principally Thorn Mount and Sean Daniels, the studio proceeded, and the movie went on to become, in 1978, the highest-grossing comedy of all time."

delanceyplace.com 8/15/11 - keeping banks lending in a financial crisis

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in a banking crisis, such as the one the U.S. faced in 2007/2008 and whose troubling after-effects remain, there are two critical items to manage. The first is that if a major financial institution fails, its operations continue so that counter-parties are not damaged and confidence in markets is not destroyed. The second is that if major financial institutions are saddled with huge numbers of bad loans, regulatory solutions be applied that allow these banks to continue to make new good loans. In the Latin American debt crisis of 1982, this second item was managed so well that few even remember the crisis. Similarly, in the Continental Illinois (Penn Square) crisis of 1984, the first item was so well-managed that markets were minimally disrupted. In the current crisis, neither item has been well-managed, leading to both the era-defining disruption of the Lehman failure and the continued hobbled operations of some of our largest financial institutions:

"Indefensible policy mistakes by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in his handling of Lehman Brothers and AIG severely damaged the credibility that eventually forced the Bush administration to recapitalize the U.S. banking system. ...

"[This contrasts sharply to Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's handling of the Continental Illinois crisis.] When Continental Illinois Bank collapsed in 1984, ... Volcker immediately asked J.P. Morgan to arrange a 'convoy' of banks around the institution [to provide liquidity and] prevent money from fleeing. Less than 48 hours later, the bank was nationalized. Although Continental Illinois was one of the nation's leading money center banks, proper handling of the nationalization process by the regulators prevented major problems.

"Inexplicably, however, Mr. Paulson decided to let Lehman Brothers fail, indicating from the start that he had no intention of using public funds to rescue the institution. Although Lehman Brothers was not a commercial bank, and the Fed and the Treasury were not obliged to save it, Paulson's stubbornness was in a sharp contrast to the Fed and the Treasury's efforts to minimize disruptions from the collapse of Bear Stearns, another securities firm. ... Lehman was a global financial institution, and thousands of investors and institutions around the world were left high and dry. The resulting anger went a long way toward destroying the credibility of U.S. banks, U.S. Bank regulators, and the U.S. government. And the rest is history. ...

"In [past crises] in the US, authorities successfully maintained lending functions of the banks when they were saddled with huge amounts of NPLs [non-performing loans or bad loans], for example, during the Latin American debt crisis, which erupted in 1982. In this crisis the U.S. had to move slowly because the vast majority of U.S. money center banks were technically insolvent and shutting down the entire banking system was not an option. With so many international banks also involved, the Fed had to be very careful in managing the crisis to ensure the continued functioning of the banking system and prevent negative fallout for the economy.

"[Federal Reserve Chairman] Paul Volcker ... handled the situation masterfully. Although the process eventually took a dozen years, it was done without a credit crunch and at no cost to taxpayers in contrast to the $160 billion bill for the cleanup of the S&L crisis, which was only a tenth the size of the Latin American debt crisis. Ironically, the Fed's response was so elegant that few people are even aware of it. Many may have heard of the crisis, but the authorities' deft handling of the situation received little public attention because no taxpayer money was required or requested. Further, no one involved could talk about it while events were still unfolding - certainly no one from the New York Fed or the technically insolvent money center banks. Nor was anyone interested in hearing about it once the cleanup was over. As a result, some of the key lessons learned from this episode are missing from the current debate on how to handle the banking crisis."

delanceyplace.com 8/12/11 - the beginning of the financial crisis

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 10:11:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - given the turmoil in financial markets over the past week, it is interesting to note the not-so-subtle beginnings of the still-current financial crisis - namely subprime real estate. With all that has transpired since 2007, it is a problem that remains only partially addressed:

"On September 30, 1999, a New York Times reporter, Steven Holmes, published a piece titled "Fannie Mae Eases Credit to Aid Mortgage Lending." The crux of the story was that Fannie Mae was lowering its credit standards, which in turn would increase home ownership. Franklin Raines, chief executive officer (CEO) of Fannie Mae at the time, is quoted in the article:

Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements. Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.

"Consistent with sound journalism, the story analyzed the potential con- sequences of Fannie Mae's foray into riskier lending. Quite presciently, the author Steven Holmes sounded an alarm that Fannie Mae was taking on large amounts of new risk, which in good times would not cause problems but in a downturn could lead to a massive government bailout. The article also quotes Peter Wallison, an American Enterprise Institute scholar and frequent critic of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), in particular, the two largest ones, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us .... If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.

"A decade later, we know how it all turned out: the worst financial crisis since the 1930s and bailouts so large that we no longer consider the savings and loan debacle to have been much of a financial crisis. This is not to argue that all of the blame should be placed on the doorstep of Fannie and Freddie. There is plenty of blame to go around at other large, complex financial institutions, including Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Wachovia, and Citigroup.

"Nevertheless, Fannie and Freddie do deserve special attention. Currently, as of August 2010, the Treasury has injected a total of $148.2 billion into these entities. Yet it looks as if their financial health is not getting any better. Even putting aside all future foreclosures and portfolio losses, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now sitting on more than 150,000 foreclosed homes. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that an additional $65 billion may be required to keep them afloat until 2019. The CBO has further estimated that the total taxpayer losses might ultimately reach the neighborhood of an astounding $350 billion.

"Yet Fannie and Freddie barely register as news. In the most sweeping financial legislation since the 1930s, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 barely mentions them, simply calling for a study of how to reform them. ...

"So where is the outrage?"

delanceyplace.com 8/11/11 - the destruction of beautiful smyrna

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:52:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - the 1922 destruction of Smyrna, a beautiful city located on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey which had twice the number of Greeks in its population as Athens itself. In a century of global ethnic cleansing, the razing of Smyrna was on a scale that the world had never before seen - and was a harbinger of much that came after. It was perhaps the most cosmopolitan and ethnically tolerant city in the world in the early twentieth century, but it fell victim to the nascent Turkish nationalist movement after misguided foreign policy moves - some say the blunders of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George - inflamed the centuries-old enmity between Turkey and Greece. Essentially all of its 700,000 inhabitants were killed, captured or fled as refugees before the Turkish National Army:

"The city [of Smyrna] was one in which fig-laden camels nudged their way past the latest Newton Bennett motor car; in which the strange new vogue of the cinema was embraced as early as 1908. There were seventeen companies dealing exclusively in imported Parisian luxuries. And if [a person] cared to read a daily newspaper, he had quite a choice: eleven Greek, seven Turkish, five Armenian, four French and five Hebrew, not to mention the ones shipped in from every capital city in Europe. ...

"Amidst the grandeur there was intense human activity. Hawkers and street traders peddled their wares along the mile-long quayside. Water sellers jangled their brass bowls; hodjas - Muslim holy men - mumbled prayers in the hope of earning a copper or two. And impecunious legal clerks. often Italian, would proffer language lessons at knock-down prices. 'You saw all sorts . . .' recalled the French journalist, Gaston Deschamps. 'Swiss hoteliers, German traders, Austrian tailors, English mill owners, Dutch fig merchants, Italian brokers, Hungarian bureaucrats, Armenian agents and Greek bankers.'

"The waterfront was lined with lively bars, brasseries and shaded cafe gardens, each of which tempted the palate with a series of enticing scents. The odour of roasted cinnamon would herald an Armenian patisserie; apple smoke spilled forth from hookahs in the Turkish cafes. Coffee and olives, crushed mint and armagnac: each smell was distinctive and revealed the presence of more than three dozen culinary traditions. Caucasian pastries, boeuf a la mode, Greek game pies and Yorkshire pudding could all be found in the quayside restaurants of Smyrna. ...

"What happened over the two weeks [following September 9, 1922] must surely rank as one of the most compelling human dramas of the twentieth century. Innocent civilians - men, women and children from scores of different nationalities - were caught in a humanitarian disaster on a scale that the world had never before seen. The entire population of the city became the victim of a reckless foreign policy that had gone hopelessly, disastrously wrong. ...

"The total death toll is hard to compute with any certainty. According to Edward Hale Bierstadt - executive of the United States Emergency Committee - approximately 100,000 people were killed and another 160,000 deported into the interior. 'It is a picture too large and too fearful to be painted,' he wrote in his 1924 study of the disaster, The Great Betrayal, although he did his best, interviewing numerous eyewitnesses and collecting their testimonies. Other estimates were more conservative, claiming that 190,000 souls were unaccounted for by the end of September. It is unclear how many of these had been killed and how many deported, although Greek sources suggest that at least 100,000 Christians were marched into the interior of the country. Most of these were never seen again. ...

"The exodus from Asia Minor was on a [massive] scale and it was to continue for many months. To [rescue worker] Esther Lovejoy's eyes, it was 'the greatest migration in the history of mankind.' The migration was eventually enshrined in law in 1923, when [Turkish leader] Mustafa Kemal put his signature to the Treaty of Lausanne. All of Turkey's remaining 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were to be uprooted from their ancestral homes and moved to Greece. And the 400,000 Muslims living in Greece were to be removed from their houses and transported to Turkey. It was ethnic cleansing without parallel."

delanceyplace.com 8/10/11 - mao murders 45 million people

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - during Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, which was an effort to use centralized Communist planning to vault China's economy past those of the Western European powers, China endured one of the greatest tragedies in human history - the death of over 45 million people:

"Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years. By unleashing China's greatest asset, a labour force that was counted in the hundreds of millions, Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Instead of following the Soviet model of development, which leaned heavily towards industry alone, China would 'walk on two legs': the peasant masses were mobilized to transform both agriculture and industry at the same time, converting a backward economy into a modern communist society of plenty for all.

"In the pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivized, as villagers were herded together in giant communes which heralded the advent of communism. People in the countryside were robbed of their work, their homes, their land, their belongings and their livelihood. Food, distributed by the spoonful in collective canteens according to merit, became a weapon to force people to follow the party's every dictate. Irrigation campaigns forced up to half the villagers to work for weeks on end on giant water-conservancy projects, often far from home, without adequate food and rest. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives. ...

"At least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962. The term 'famine', or even 'Great Famine', is often used to describe these four to five years of the Maoist era, but the term fails to capture the many ways in which people died under radical collectivization. The blithe use of the term 'famine' also lends support to the widespread view that these deaths were the unintended consequence of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. Mass killings are not usually associated with Mao and the Great Leap Forward, and China continues to benefit from a more favourable comparison with the devastation usually associated with Cambodia or the Soviet Union. But as the fresh evidence ... demonstrates, coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.

"Thanks to the often meticulous reports compiled by the party itself, we can infer that between 1958 and 1962 by a rough approximation 6 to 8 per cent of the victims were tortured to death or summarily killed - amounting to at least 2.5 million people. Other victims were deliberately deprived of food and starved to death. Many more vanished because they were too old, weak or sick to work - and hence unable to earn their keep. People were killed selectively because they were rich, because they dragged their feet, because they spoke out or simply because they were not liked, for whatever reason, by the man who wielded the ladle in the canteen. Countless people were killed indirectly through neglect, as local cadres were under pressure to focus on figures rather than on people, making sure they fulfilled the targets they were handed by the top planners.

"A vision of promised abundance not onlv motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history, but also inflicted unprecedented damage on agriculture, trade, industry and transportation. Pots, pans and tools were thrown into backyard furnaces to increase the country's steel output, which was seen as one of the magic markers of progress. Livestock declined precipitously, not only because animals were slaughtered for the export market but also because they succumbed en masse to disease and hunger - despite extravagant schemes for giant piggeries that would bring meat to every table. Waste developed because raw resources and supplies were poorly allocated, and because factory bosses deliberately bent the rules to increase output. As everyone cut corners in the relentless pursuit of higher output, factories spewed out inferior goods that accumulated uncollected by railway sidings. Corruption seeped into the fabric of life, tainting everything from soy sauce to hydraulic dams. 'The transportation system creaked to a halt before collapsing altogether, unable to cope with the demands created by a command economy. Goods worth hundreds of millions of yuan accumulated in canteens, dormitories and even on the streets, a lot of the stock simply rotting or rusting away. It would have been difficult to design a more wasteful system, one in which grain was left uncollected by dusty roads in the countryside as people foraged for roots or ate mud."

delanceyplace.com 8/9/11 - russia's "degrading superstitions"

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the 1800s, Russia had a highly religious culture with a devotion to Jerusalem and a frantic passion that repelled European Catholics and Protestants, and left those Europeans feeling they had more in common with the "reserve and dignity" of Muslims. It was this separation that helped lead England and France to side with the Muslim Ottoman Empire against Russia in the Crimean War—the bloodiest European war of the nineteenth century:

"In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church sent more pilgrims to Jerusalem than any other branch of the Christian faith. Every year up to 15,000 Russian pilgrims would arrive in Jerusalem for the Easter festival, some even making the long trek on foot across Russia and the Caucasus, through Anatolia and Syria. For the Russians, the holy shrines of Palestine were objects of intense and passionate devotion: to make a pilgrimage to them was the highest possible expression of their faith.

"In some ways the Russians saw the Holy Lands as an extension of their spiritual motherland. The idea of 'Holy Russia' was not contained by any territorial boundaries; it was an empire of the Orthodox with sacred shrines throughout the lands of Eastern Christianity and with the Holy Sepulchre as its mother church. 'Palestine', wrote one Russian theologian in the 1840s, 'is our native land, in which we do not recognize ourselves as foreigners.' Centuries of pilgrimage had laid the basis of this claim, establishing a link between the Russian Church and the Holy Places (connected with the life of Christ in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazareth) which many Russians counted more important—the basis of a higher spiritual authority—than the temporal and political sovereignty of the Ottomans in Palestine.

"Nothing like this ardor could be found among the Catholics or Protestants, for whom the Holy Places were objects of historical interest and romantic sentiment rather than religious devotion. The travel writer and historian Alexander Kinglake thought that 'the closest likeness of a pilgrim which the Latin Church could supply was often a mere French tourist with a journal and a theory and a plan of writing a book'. European tourists were repelled by the intense passion of the Orthodox pilgrims, whose strange rituals struck them as 'barbaric' and as 'degrading superstitions'. [English social commentator Harriet] Martineau refused to go to the Holy Sepulchre to see the washing of the pilgrims' feet on Good Friday. 'I could not go to witness [rituals] done in the name of Christianity,' she wrote, 'compared with which the lowest fetishism on the banks of an African river would have been inoffensive.'

"For the same reason, she would not go to the ceremony of the Holy Fire on Easter Saturday, when thousands of Orthodox worshippers squeezed into the Holy Sepulchre to light their torches from the miraculous flames that appeared from the tomb of Christ. Rival groups of Orthodox—Greeks, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Serbians and Russians—would jostle with each other to light their candles first; fights would start; and sometimes worshippers were crushed to death or suffocated in the smoke. Baron Curzon, who witnessed one such scene in 1834, described the ceremony as a 'scene of disorder and profanation' in which the pilgrims, 'almost in a state of nudity, danced about with frantic gestures, yelling and screaming as if they were possessed.'

"It is hardly surprising that a Unitarian such as Martineau or an Anglican like Curzon should have been so hostile to such rituals: demonstrations of religious emotion had long been effaced from the Protestant Church. Like many tourists in the Holy Land, they sensed that they had less in common with the Orthodox pilgrims, whose wild behaviour seemed barely Christian at all, than with the relatively secular Muslims, whose strict reserve and dignity were more in sympathy with their own private forms of quiet prayer. Attitudes like theirs were to influence the formation of Western policies towards Russia in the diplomatic disputes about the Holy Land which would eventually lead to the Crimean War."

delanceyplace.com 8/8/11 - cinema stops taking itself quite so seriously

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:03:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - after World War II, movies about spies and war were taken seriously - a movie told a story and the audience was expected to believe it. Ian Fleming's wildly popular books about James Bond continued that tradition - Fleming's Bond was a humorless, high-born, and unquestioningly patriotic creature. (In fact, Fleming dismissed the idea of Alfred Hitchcock directing his films because he he felt he would not treat them seriously enough). Sean Connery - who was relatively unknown, was climbing up from a working class background, and was paid a relative pittance for the role - knew intuitively to imbue his Bond with insolence and an amoral humor. Thus 1962'sDr. No, the first of the Bond movies, marks the beginning of decadence in post-war cinema - the first time the audience is in on the joke:

"Sean Connery was nothing like the Bond so plainly envisaged in the Dr. Noscreenplay. That screenplay, finally knocked together by [director] Terence Young and his assistant Joanna Harwood in a week-long session at the Dorchester Hotel, was written for precisely the kind of old-fashioned public-school hero Connery's instinctively insolent creation was about to do away with. ...

" 'But of course!' Connery's Bond is required to say at one point in the action (as he will be throughout his pictures in the series; Roger Moore - on whom such stuffed-shirt inanities might have sat rather better - was never asked to utter the line). Hitherto, such stockbroker Sheridan would have been sayable only if dressed in the exclamatory high camp British cinema specialized in. Connery, though, played the line for laughs by uttering it in the mocking, unshockable, dignified yet dressed-down drawl that would come to be one of the hallmarks of his Bond. It is impossible to overemphasise how central to the movie those democratically satirical inflections were. Without them, the Bond of Dr. Nowould have been as insufferably snobbish as the Bond of Fleming's original novels. Without them, there would have been no From Russia with Love, let alone any Quantum of Solace. ... The movie [version of] Bond owed much ... to Connery's languorously insurrectionary take on what he saw as the jumped-up imperialist bore.

"Both Young and Connery have claimed authorship for the movie Bond's flip, amoral humour. 'When I flew out [to Jamaica] with Sean, before anyone else came,' Young told a TV documentary, 'I said, 'For Christ's sake, Sean, we've got to make this picture a little bit amusing - it's the only way we're going to get away with murder.' Because a lot of the sex and violence, I think, (a), is objectionable and, (b), will never get past the censor.

"Connery, for his part, was always insistent that humour was essential to the movie Bond. Indeed so, though it should be pointed out that ... the Bond of the novels never cracks a joke, and Fleming himself was so humourless that fancy the idea of Alfred Hitchcock turning his novels into movies though he did, he also worried that Hitch might treat them with insufficient seriousness. ...

"While patriotic to the point of self-mockery, Connery's Bond seemed not at all tied to notions of history and tradition, but merely to the self-aggrandising conspicuous consumption that was the true hallmark of the [1960s] decade which spawned him. Bond's affectlessness - when he learns the detail of Dr No's plans he neither laughs nor cries but merely sounds weary at what he calls 'the same old dream: world domination'- chimed with a post-Suez British public wary of imperial overreach. Hence the movie's pop art elements, which tipped the wink to the audience that they weren't meant to take this stuff seriously. Everything they were watching, Connery's sly, sideways-on performance kept reminding them, was all part of a big joke.

"Nobody saw this more clearly than [French auteur] Francois Truffaut. 'For me,' the director told an auteurist worshipper, 'the film that marks the beginning of the period of decadence in the cinema is the first James Bond - Dr. No. Until then the role of the cinema had been by and large to tell a story in the hope that the audience would believe it. There had been a few minority films which were parodies of this narrative tradition, but in the main a film told a story and the audience wanted to believe that story.' (Don Allen interviewing Truffaut, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1979.)

delanceyplace.com 8/5/11 - duels, the electoral college and politics

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 03:29:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - one of the strangest and most unsatisfying features of our Constitution is the electoral college. In 1824, this led the country to outrage at what most thought to be an underhanded presidential election. Since party nominating conventions were not yet developed, six formidable candidates competed in the general election - New England's John Quincy Adams, Georgia's William H. Crawford, South Carolina's fiery John C. Calhoun, New York's De Witt Clinton, Kentucky's Henry Clay, and Tennessee's Andrew Jackson. Even though Jackson won a plurality of popular votes, since no one won a majority of electoral votes (and in six states electors were chosen by legislatures rather than the popular vote), the election was thrown to the House of Representatives. There, powerhouse legislator Henry Clay, though he had the least electoral votes of any, schemed to give them to John Quincy Adams in exchange for a promise to be named Secretary of State, and Adams became President. Legislators and voters fumed. [Also, note below the strong American desire as late as 1824 to wage war to acquire Canada - a feat that had been unsuccessfully attempted during the War of 1812]:

"The issue that Polk first addressed was stoked by partisan outrage left over from the disputed presidential election. At issue was a proposed constitutional amendment either to abolish the electoral college outright and provide for a direct popular vote, or to modify the electoral college and require presidential electors to cast their vote for the candidate receiving a plurality in their district.

"In the Senate, Clay was under assault from Virginia's crusty John Randolph. Clay and Randolph had never seen eye to eye on even the most trivial of issues. In fact, when Clay had set about making the speakership a position of true power upon his first election to that post in 1811 he had unceremoniously ordered Randolph to remove his dog from the House floor-something no previous Speaker had dared to do. On more substantive issues, Randolph vehemently opposed the fixation of Clay and his war hawks on acquiring Canada.

"But now the feud became more personal. Randolph indulged in a rambling discourse that touched on all phases of Clay's perceived follies, but most of all upon his "corrupt bargain" with John Quincy Adams. No longer able to defend himself verbally as a member of Congress, Clay did the one thing that smacked more of Andrew Jackson than of his benefactor Adams. He promptly challenged Randolph to a duel. Randolph was only too happy to oblige.

"Never mind that by now most states, including Clay's own Kentucky, had outlawed dueling, or that many in Congress, and Clay himself, entertained questions about Randolph's sanity. In the end, Clay determined that "I ought not to be governed by that opinion [of Randolph's insanity] which was opposed by the recent act of my native state electing him to the Senate."

"So, on April 8, 1826, despite the entreaties of their seconds to postpone or forgo the matter, the secretary of state of the United States and Senator John Randolph of Virginia faced off at ten paces beneath a cluster of trees just across the Potomac River from Washington.

"At the command of 'Fire!' both men took aim and discharged, their weapons. The ball from Clay's pistol struck the ground near Randolph; the senator's own shot hit a stump behind Clay. "Enough!" cried Senator Thomas Hart Benton,who was witnessing the exchange and who, as first cousin to Clay's wife, had done his best to avert it. But neither combatant was satisfied. Their weapons were reloaded and again came the command, 'Fire!' Clay's ball struck almost the same spot. Randolph fired into the air.

" 'I do not fire at you, Mr. Clay,' thundered Randolph, as he quickly advanced toward Clay with outstretched hand. Clay met his opponent halfway and shook hands. Benton and the attendant seconds breathed sigh of relief. Two days later, Clay and Randolph exchanged calling cards, a sign that social relations between the two were formally restored. Such was life in Washington in 1826. As for the electoral college, its structure was never changed, and two centuries later, it remains as enacted in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment."

delanceyplace.com 8/4/11 - war, loneliness, and sex

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - the carnage of World War I, and the prostitutes that were a moment of relief from that carnage. World War I, the Great War, had no precedent in its bloodshed - the mere boys who marched to war from Britain and elsewhere were witness to twenty-three million casualties:

"The [British] Government's morale-boosting propaganda had contributed in large part to the ignorance at home of the true state of affairs [in the war] abroad. Positive stories written by journalists who feared if they told the truth were designed to put the best possible slant on the news. Soldiers who longed to describe the dreadful reality of warfare had their letters censored. ...

"How were soldiers to find a way to describe to their isolated, sometimes disbelieving families what happened out there? ... Loneliness was constant. Men missed women. ...

"Just behind the battle lines only a mile or two from the front, girls waited to 'comfort' men, irrespective of whether they were German, British or French, waiting for them in abandoned chateaux, village houses, hay barns, caravans, farm buildings and the upper floors of inns. Different coloured lanterns indicated the rank of clientele allowed entry. Blue denoted a place reserved for officers, the light sometimes swinging from a pole that stood next to a sign declaring 'No Admittance for Dogs and Soldiers'. Common soldiers were directed towards the red light establishments. Sometimes the queues outside these places could number a hundred men or more, with three worn-out French women waiting inside. The price per slot varied from two and a half to ten francs or two to eight shillings, although a bartering system involving bread and sausages was also prevalent. One innocent young officer, hearing his turn called, made his way to room number six where in the bitter-sweet, dirt- smelling near darkness he could see the outline of a female figure who, turning towards him, hiked up her black nightdress to her waist and fell backwards on the edge of the bed. He realised that the highly anticipated delights of seduction were already over. She was ready.

"These women estimated that operating a strict schedule of ten minutes per man, they could service an entire battalion every seven days, a production rate that most were usually able to sustain for only three weeks before retiring exhausted, and invariably unwell, but proud of their staying power. This experience had been, for many of the prospectively syphilitic young men, their introduction to the 'joy' of physical love. Even the virginal Prince of Wales went in 1916 with some fellow officers to watch naked girls performing erotic poses in a brothel in Calais, concluding from his own 'first insight into such things' that it was a 'perfectly filthy and revolting sight'. ...

"The threat of venereal disease sometimes led soldiers to seek sexual relief with each other. The Field Almanac issued to Lieutenant Skelton cautioned men not to 'ease themselves promiscuously', although the detailed instructions on the necessity for cleanliness of the body at all times were impossible to implement in the filthy conditions of the camps. George V, hearing of the extent of homosexual activity in the army some two decades after the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, had been heard to mutter: 'I thought men like that shot themselves.' There was also a belief that homosexuality might be infectious and Scotland Yard kept a register of known homosexuals. Recovery from prosecution was at best rare and in reality unknown. Two hundred and seventy soldiers and twenty officers were court-martialled for 'acts of gross indecency with another male person according to the Guidance notes in the Manual of Military Law'."

delanceyplace.com 8/3/11 - the Noble Gases

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:48:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the Noble Gases, also known as inert gases, are located in column eighteen on the far right side of the Periodic Table of Elements and consist of: Helium (He), Neon (Ne), Argon (Ar), Krypton (Kr), Xenon (Xe), and Radon (Rn). Each of these gases, under standard conditions, is odorless, colorless, monatomic gases, with very low chemical reactivity:

"Noble is an archaic, word, less chemistry than ethics or philosophy. And indeed, the term 'noble gases' goes back to the birthplace of Western philosophy, ancient Greece. There, after his fellow Greeks Leucippus and Democritus invented the idea of atoms, Plato minted the word "elements" (in Greek, stoicheia) as a general term for different small particles of matter. Plato - who left Athens for his own safety after the death of his mentor, Socrates, around 400 BC and wandered around writing philosophy for years - of course lacked knowledge of what an element really is in chemistry terms. But if he had known, he no doubt would have selected the elements on the eastern edge of the table, especially helium, as his favorites.

"In his dialogue on love and the erotic, The Symposium, Plato claimed that every being longs to find its complement, its missing half. When applied to people, this implies passion and sex and all the troubles that accompany passion and sex. In addition, Plato emphasized throughout his dialogues that abstract and unchanging things are intrinsically more noble than things that grub around and interact with gross matter. ...

"Helium is also the best example of 'element-ness' - a substance that cannot be broken down or altered by normal, chemical means. It took scientists 2,200 years, from Greece in 400 BC to Europe in 1800 AD, to grasp what elements really are, because most are too changeable. It was hard to see what made carbon carbon when it appeared in thousands of compounds, all with different properties. Today we would say that carbon dioxide, for instance, isn't an element because one molecule of it divides into carbon and oxygen. But carbon and oxygen are elements because you cannot divide them more finely without destroying them. Returning to the theme of The Symposium and Plato's theory of erotic longing for a missing half, we find that virtually every element seeks out other atoms to form bonds with, bonds that mask its nature. Even most "pure" elements, such as oxygen molecules in the air (02)' always appear as composites in nature. Yet scientists might have figured out what elements are much sooner had they known about helium, which has never reacted with another substance, has never been anything but a pure element.

"Helium acts this way for a reason. All atoms contain negative particles called electrons, which reside in different tiers, or energy levels, inside the atom. The levels are nested concentrically inside each other, and each level needs a certain number of electrons to fill itself and feel satisfied. In the innermost level, that number is two. In other levels, it's usually eight. Elements normally have equal numbers of negative electrons and positive particles called protons, so they're electrically neutral. Electrons, however, can be freely traded between atoms, and when atoms lose or gain electrons, they form charged atoms called ions.

"What's important to know is that atoms fill their inner, lower-energy levels as full as possible with their own electrons, then either shed, share, or steal electrons to secure the right number in the outermost level. Some elements share or trade electrons diplomatically, while others act very, very nasty. That's half of chemistry in one sentence: atoms that don't have enough electrons in the outer level will fight, barter, beg, make and break alliances, or do whatever they must to get the right number.

"Helium, element two, has exactly the number of electrons it needs to fill its only level. This "closed" configuration gives helium tremendous independence, because it doesn't need to interact with other atoms or share or steal electrons to feel satisfied. Helium has found its erotic complement in itself. What's more, that same configuration extends down the entire eighteenth column beneath helium - the gases neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon. All these elements have closed shells with full complements of electrons, so none of them reacts with anything under normal conditions. That's why, despite all the fervid activity to identify and label elements in the 1800s-including the development of the periodic table itself-no one isolated a single gas from column eighteen before 1895. That aloofness from everyday experience, so like his ideal spheres and triangles, would have charmed Plato. And it was that sense the scientists who discovered helium and its brethren on earth were trying to evoke with the name 'noble gases.' Or to put it in Plato-like words, "He who adores the perfect and unchangeable and scorns the corruptible and ignoble will prefer the noble gases, by far, to all other elements. For they never vary, never waver, never pander to other elements like hoi polloi offering cheap wares in the marketplace. They are incorruptible and ideal."

"The repose of the noble gases is rare, however. One column to the west sits the most energetic and reactive gases on the periodic table, the halogens. And if you think of the table wrapping around like a Mercator map, so that east meets west and column eighteen meets column one, even more violent elements appear on the western edge, the alkali metals. The pacifist noble gases are a demilitarized zone surrounded by unstable neighbors."

delanceyplace.com 8/2/11 - the birth of espn

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 09:43:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1978, Bill Rasmussen, just fired as the communication manager of the Hartford Whalers, concocted the idea of starting a cable station dedicated to Connecticut sports programing and calling it ESP:

"Rasmussen knew virtually nothing about the cable TV business, but he wasn't alone: in 1978, there were just over 14 million homes receiving cable - less than 20 percent of all TV households. HBO had gone on the air in 1975 but offered

limited programming and signed off at midnight. A year later, Ted Turner uplinked his then-piddling Atlanta UHF outlet to a satellite, thereby creating the country's first 'SuperStation,' but one that delivered more Braves games than original programming. The next year, televangelist Pat Robertson launched his 700 Club on satellite, and in 1978, despite the fact that HBO reached only 1.5 million homes, Viacom fired up its slow-blooming imitation, Showtime. ...

"Beginning in the summer of 1978, Bill, his son Scott, [friend and insurance man Ed] Eagan, and Eagan's buddy Bob Beyus, who owned a video production company, sought the backing of cable operators and potential investors for a new sports channel. They had originally wanted to name it SPN, the Sports Programming Network, but something called the Satellite Programming Network had already laid claim to those letters. Bill knew they'd have a tough time filling hours with only Connecticut sports and argued that they'd have to include some entertainment programming. Thus was it born: ESP, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.

"On June 26, presentations began. ESP invited twelve representatives of Connecticut's cable operators to a rented conference room at United Cable in Plainville, Connecticut. Only five showed up, and those mostly out of deference to Bill Rasmussen's contacts in the industry rather than out of breathless anticipation of the new enterprise. Skeptically, they listened to far-fetched proposals about delivering Connecticut collegiate sporting events, amateur sports, the Whalers, and 'entertainment' programming to cable operators via an interstate network. The reaction was a double shot of bad news: implausible, the cable crowd said, and too costly.

"Undaunted that the presentation bombed, the quartet of entrepreneurs pushed ahead, holding a press conference days later to spread the word. Of the thirty-five reporters invited to attend the grand announcement of ESP, a mere four attended, and none of them were particularly impressed. Neither was Beyus, who had thought it complete folly to hold a press conference without any contracts, but was outvoted by his partners. Immediately following the press conference, he officially flew the coop. Still undeterred, the Rasmussens and Eagan formally incorporated ESP Network on July 14, 1978, for a fee of $91.

"BILL RASMUSSEN: When Scott and I talked with Jim Dover over at United Cable, he told us about something new coming along called satellite communication and said it was going to be the wave of the future. A couple guys over at United helped us try to figure out what the satellites did, but nobody really had any idea. Then someone said that RCA was doing a lot of this stuff in Europe and we should talk to those guys. We called in the middle of the afternoon, and a young guy named Al Parinello answered the phone. ... Al wanted to get together and asked us where we were located, but we didn't have offices. We asked Jim Dover at United Cable if we could rent the conference room there and he said, 'Give me a $20 bill.' So that was the rent, and Al came and showed us all these diagrams of satellites and how this happens, and how that happens.

"AL PARINELLO: We're talking pewter ashtrays, a big oak table, and china dishes that lunch was served on. Bill said, 'This is our headquarters.' Little did I know that he had rented this beautiful room. My first question was 'What kind of programming are we talking about?' And the answer was we're talking about regional sports programming - UConn sporting events, and so forth. I was confused. I'm like, 'Bill, you need to understand that when you utilize satellite communications, your signal is going to go up to a geosynchronous satellite orbiting 24,300 miles above the equator. And because of that, anybody with an earth station anywhere can get your programming. So it seems to me that you shouldn't just be talking about Connecticut sports, why not think in terms of doing something a little bigger?' That was the moment I saw Bill and Scott look at each other like I had just hit a nerve."

delanceyplace.com 8/1/11 - a time when americans "voted as they shot"

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:09:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - one legacy of the Civil War was that America was cemented into a two-party system as never before, with the Republican Party dominating in the afterglow of victory and the legacy of Lincoln. The Republican Party of the 1870s and 1880s, however, was different than that of today, since it concerned itself primarily with enacting protective tariffs for business, promoting big government initiatives for internal improvements such as railroads, and doling out the self-serving spoils of power. It was a period of unprecedented growth and the very period in which America's industrial might led it to world ascendancy. Yet in 1890, on the heels of increasing tariffs yet again, an uneasy electorate overturned the Republican hegemony with landslide victories for the Democratic Party:

"The self-serving cynicism of the Republican leaders, however, had far stronger roots than mere cynicism. Ultimately it rested on a belief shared by all Republicans of note that the Republican Party was not merely superior to the Democrats but that it alone was entitled to rule the Union it had formerly saved. The capacity of the Republican Party for sustained, active, and insolent self-serving stemmed in great measure from that belief and precisely because it was not entirely hypocritical. In the long political history of mankind the moments of glory have been few. Fewer still are the moments of glory for which a political party can claim credit. The Republican Party, the party that had raised to the presidency one of the noblest figures in history, which had saved a sundered Republic, which had emancipated a nation's slaves and established them, if only briefly, on a footing of political equality with their former masters, had written one truly glorious chapter in the political history of mankind. Legitimated by the party's historic glory, the Republicans' belief in their title to rule America was readily understandable. ...

"This passionate attachment to party, little known before the Civil War, had been forged by the Civil War itself. If was as if, in the cauldron of civil strife, every American had been melted down into one or the other of two elementary political particles, one Republican, the other Democrat. To its massed and devoted partisans the party was a church, whose creeds and slogans supplied men with their political principles, whose celebrations supplied them with their holiday outings. To its massed and devoted partisans the party was also a standing army perpetually arrayed for battle, an army whose orders men gladly obeyed, whose rudest tricks its partisans cheered, as patriots will cheer the night raids and ambushes of the nation's fighting men. Identifying themselves with a party, Americans looked on their chosen party as a kind of end in itself; its victories were their victories, its prosperity their prosperity. For themselves they asked little, for the identification with party was strong and passionate. In the Middle West in the 1880s, 'the Republican Party,' recalled the urban reformer Brand Whitlock, 'was not a faction, not a group, not a wing, it was an institution ... a synonym for patriotism, another name for the nation. One became, in Urbana and in Ohio for many years, a Republican just as the Eskimo dons fur clothes.' If the Democrats' supporters did not harbor such grandiose sentiments, their attachment to the Democracy was nonetheless deep, in part because the self-vaunting Republicans treated their party rivals with arrogant contempt.

"Because the party was a church, questioning one's party's creed was looked upon as heresy. Because the party was a standing army, rebellion within a party stood condemned as base treachery and was almost unknown. ... Independent voters aligned to neither party were looked upon either as boodlers -'floaters' who voted for the party that offered the larger election-day bribe - or self-important cranks. ...

"For the post-Civil War party leaders the advantages of what Whitlock called 'those days of silly partisanship' were many. The electorate's fidelity to party enabled the leaders to pursue on the state and local levels corrupt and self-serving policies in the certain knowledge that exceedingly few of their supporters could stomach the prospect of voting for the rival party. It enabled them to overawe independent-minded politicians with crushing assaults on their disloyalty to the party that had chosen to advance them. Most important, it allowed the two national parties, for almost a generation, to keep significant economic issues out of the political arena - issues that might split a party organization and weaken its hold on the voters' elected representatives, As long as men adhered to their party on the basis of Civil War passions, as long as they 'voted as they shot,' the two major parties could refight the Civil War in their election campaigns and leave the electorate reasonably appeased. Since both parties benefited by keeping Civil War passions alive, both parties cooperated in doing so. ...

"[Yet] the voters in 1890 [rose] up in wrath against the Republicans' vaunted instrument for promoting industrial expansion, the protective tariff. The public anger was understandable. Throughout the 1880s it had become increasingly clear that the prevailing high duties on imports had completely lost their original purpose, protecting 'infant' American industries from destructive overseas competition. By 1890 America's industries had not only ceased to be infants, they had become so efficient that American manufacturers were prepared to undercut their European rivals in the markets of the world. The Republicans' best vote-getting argument for protection, namely that it protected the American wage earner, was losing its factual basis. If American industrialists could pay so-called 'American wages' and still compete abroad, then obviously they could do so at home without any need for high tariff walls. The only just and sensible tariff policy was a reduction in the prevailing rates, since every unnecessary penny of duty meant unearned windfall profits for the protected manufacturer."

Letter to our Subscribers

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:46:00 -0400

Thank you for all of the positive feedback on Facebook.

I wanted to send this note of appreciation and respond to all the gracious comments we have recently received on Facebook. In these comments, a lot of readers have asked for a bit more background on Delanceyplace and our process for selecting items – so here goes:

Why did I start Delanceyplace? Certainly not for the money – Delanceyplace is strictly a not-for-profit. In fact, the money we do make when readers buy books through the site is earmarked for children’s literacy organizations. Instead, Delanceyplace is a genuine passion. I read a lot. Probably two or three books a week. Almost entirely non-fiction. And for as long as I have been reading, I have never failed to come across certain passages (we call them “excerpts”) that seemed to me so striking that I felt the strong desire to share them with whatever poor soul happened to be close at hand. Few things compare to the rush I feel when I stumble across an excerpt that explains something I have been puzzling over, persuasively contradicts something I have previously believed, or reveals something I had never expected. With the advent of the internet, it didn’t take much to begin sharing those passages electronically.

What qualifies me to do this? Well, I think it is because I have stumbled a lot and so now can better recognize and share those stories that illuminate the surprises, contradictions, limitations and nuances of life. (Though I hope in some areas my successes have slightly outnumbered my mistakes.) When I was young and read history, it seemed unreachable – heroic – something to aspire to. And while the events of my life have never been ones that were worthy of a history book, when I read history now I can feel the emotions, I understand the foibles and deceits. It seems familiar – in part because I have been through similar things, albeit on a much more modest scale. I know risk. I have been in situations where I had a stomach tightening stake. I have tried to make change and been thwarted by the real arbiters of power. I have seen the creation of art. I know skyscrapers in Beijing and urchins in Marrakesh. From where I sit when I read about Babe Didrikson Zaharias or T.S. Eliot, I learn less from their triumphs than from their personal struggles because I have struggled too. I have had my share of heartbreak – and joy – as a father, husband, lover and son.

What kinds of excerpts do I favor? Well, I have a weakness for things contrarian. And I love excerpts that quantify things, because historians (and politicians) seem to have an almost pathological neglect of numbers. For example, I find it fascinating that Prohibition led to the opening of over a million new speakeasies, or that the Afghanistan War costs over $100 billion a year while the entire Afghanistan economy is only $15 billion a year. I love language and words and the explanations that attach to them. I have a passion for the study of the mind, and often include passages from works on psychology – in large part because I view the study of history to ultimately be the study of behavior and therefore itself a study of the mind. All these views tend to spill across the pages of Delanceyplace.

History is “stranger than fiction.” Our minds tend to fit the things we see and learn into existing, comfortable storylines. We do this in part because it is comfortable, but also because it is easier. We simply don’t have the time to dig deeply and to gain a more complete understanding of most of the things we encounter. But the reality underneath the accepted storyline is often a vastly different story. To me, re-examining history, ”warts and all,” better prepares us for dealing with things in our lives today – be they personal or societal.

For example, George Washington is one of my favorite characters in all of history. But it does me no good to read “hagiographies” of his life – books that treat him as a saint with no flaws. It is much more useful to me to know he was arrogant and insecure, that he was a clumsy military strategist who was almost fired from his position as general, and that he was a land speculator whose financial interests played a part in his decision to fight against the King. It is useful because what I really want to know is how he kept himself together and persevered in spite of those things, and how he balanced his personal financial interests against larger issues, and gained the support of his countrymen and the world. That’s the sort of thing I want to know.

I revel in the wonders and achievements of our country; nevertheless, it helps me to learn that the War of 1812 was fought in part because of American speculators’ desire for land in the west, or that the Spanish American War was fought in part because of certain politicians’ needs for a new cause to distract from recent domestic woes. Why does it help? Because there is similar complexity in decisions about wars today, and those complexities are hidden under the simplified narratives we read in the newspapers. It is instructive to learn how many myths the media created in the first 24 hours of the Columbine tragedy still persist today, though long since disproven. Most things written about the Scopes Monkey trial portray it as a the dawn of a new age of scientific education - but every action brings a sometimes unnoticed counter-reaction, and it may be more instructive to learn that the trial was perhaps the single most powerful impetus for launching the fervent Christian fundamentalist movement so broadly present today. And World War I – itself the cause of World War II – makes much more sense when we read that a method for synthetically manufacturing gunpowder was discovered in 1909. Previously, the lack of plentiful gunpowder constrained the size of wars. Absent that discovery, the war would have no doubt been another limited and obscure European war that would have likely been called the “Austro-Serbian War of 1914” and then immediately disappeared from the history books.

Don’t get me wrong, even though I tend to be a contrarian, I don’t often cast my lot with conspiracy theorists. I think conspiracy theorists almost always give far too much credit for competency to those they believe are conspiring. I just think many of our motives are base rather than noble – I know mine sometimes are – and the world often plays out accordingly.

History, closely examined, can teach us when to be wary. Much more, though, it can teach us what to notice, to cherish, and to embrace.

I am deeply grateful for the interest in Delanceyplace. Comments like the ones we have recently received make the endeavor all the more worthwhile.

Warmest regards and heartfelt thanks,

Richard

delanceyplace.com 7/29/11 - fame is fleeting

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1926, the most famous woman in America was Gertrude Ederle:

"In 1926, at the age of nineteen, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Only five men had done it before her.

"Few sports stories during the Roaring Twenties rivaled Ederle's quest to conquer the English Channel. Reporters rhapsodized over the 1924 Olympic bronze medalist's audacious bid to bridge a sports gender gap measured by the twenty-one miles separating Cape Gris-Nez, France, and Dover, England. 'I felt that I would sooner be in that tug the day she starts than at the ringside of the greatest fight or at the arena of the greatest game in the world - for this, in my opinion, is to be the greatest sports story in the world,' writer W.O. McGeehan gushed.

"At 7:08 a.m. on August 6, 1926, Ederle plunged into the dark, icy water off Cape Gris-Nez. This was her second attempt to swim the Channel; a year earlier, she hadn't been able to finish. The simple fact that she was trying again, beating three other women swimmers determined to swim the Channel before she did, was itself an accomplishment. Making it to England, however, was something else. By late afternoon, Ederle was being buffeted by pounding swells, pelting rain, and pesky winds. From a nearby tugboat, her trainer, Thomas Burgess, yelled, 'Gertie, you must come out.'

" 'What for?' she asked.

"At 9:39 p.m., Ederle reached Kingsdown on the English coast, where a British immigration official asked to see her passport. The rough weather had lengthened Ederle's swimming course to the equivalent of thirty-five miles, a distance she had covered in an astonishing 14 hours 31 minutes. Her time shattered the English Channel record by 2 hours 2 minutes.

"No woman athlete in American history had ever received the rush of adulation lavished on Gertrude Ederle. When she returned home, Manhattan threw her a ticker tape parade grander than the ones that had saluted the greatest heroes of World War I. Two million people lined Broadway to catch a glimpse of the sports heroine, whom President Calvin Coolidge had dubbed 'America's Best Girl.' New York City mayor James J. Walker compared her feat to Moses parting the Red Sea, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and Washington crossing the Delaware. Trudy Ederle was bombarded with movie, stage, and commercial offers totaling nearly $1 million. After she received hundreds of marriage proposals, a songwriting duo wrote, 'You're such a cutie, you're just as sweet as tutti-frutti, Trudy, who'll be the lucky fellow?'

"In a matter of weeks, however, nearly all the most lucrative offers had been withdrawn. With few prospects to swim for money, Ederle joined the vaudeville circuit in 1927. She earned $2,000 a week, but after a year she suffered a nervous breakdown from the strain of giving six performances a day. She was also hampered by poor advice from uncouth business managers. By the end of the decade, Ederle was nearly broke. She was forced to slink off the public stage, resurfacing momentarily in 1939 when she swam, along with three hundred showgirls, in Billy Rose's Aquacade at the New York World's Fair. She had been hearing impaired since the age of five and had lost all her hearing by the late 1930s. During World War II, she worked at LaGuardia Airport as an aircraft instrument technician.

"In 1975, Ederle was a nearly anonymous sixty-eight-year-old woman living in a modest apartment in Queens. She never married. Her next-door neighbors had no idea who she was or what she had done. 'Don't write any sob stories about me,' she told a reporter. 'I'm not a millionaire but I'm comfortable.' The reporter wondered if she had any idea why the world had so quickly forgotten her astonishing feat. 'I would be stupid if I hadn't realized that people couldn't stand forever on street corners playing brass bands,' she said. 'It doesn't really matter if they've forgotten me. I haven't forgotten them.' "

delanceyplace.com 7/28/11 - coco chanel, the first world war and fashion for the masses

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - Coco Chanel. The flamboyance and frills of 19th century Paris fashion were lost in the liberation of European and American women during World War I. The leader of the new fashion revolution was Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel:

"Ornate styles were obsolete by the 1920s. Emancipated during World War I, females were now working in factories, offices and shops; riding subways, buses and bicycles; and, in some instances, driving cars. They had neither the time nor the patience for fastidious trimmings, and the designer who intuitively sensed this transition was Gabrielle Chanel - 'Coco.' Conceiving le genre pauvre, she put women into men's shaggy sweaters, sailors' tricots, carpenters' coarse corduroys, ditchdiggers' grainy denims, waitresses' bleached aprons, soccer players' striped jerseys, students' sturdy gabardines.

"Nothing was too banal for her - sandals, bandannas, berets. Slender and athletic, with the lissome gait of a racehorse, Chanel made the kinds of clothes that she herself liked to wear. Her gamine creations presaged unisex, yet essential chic in her mind was a prosaic dress drenched in diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Fashion, she asserted, ought to appeal to the masses rather than be restricted to a precious few. When a coalition of couturiers petitioned the government to enact tough legislation to prevent piracy, she dissented, maintaining that fraudulent copies earned them popularity. The conceits of herconfreres, she said, were preposterous. 'We are furnishers, not artists. At first art seems ugly and then becomes beautiful; at first fashion seems beautiful and then becomes ugly.'

"The daughter of an Auvergne wine dealer, she was reared on a farm by two maiden aunts and, at the age of seventeen, fled to Paris to escape the boredom of the provinces. [Editor's note: many commentators have said she was instead raised in an orphanage and contrived the story of the aunts due to the stigma associated with being an orphan at the time]. After a stint as a milliner, she opened a dress shop adjacent to the Ritz, and it remained her headquarters. She would turn on her charm to induce boulevardiers to escort her to trendy spots like Maxim's, Fouquet's and the Pre Catalan, where she could parade her own raiment before the crème de la crème. Her styles clicked, and, by the 1930s, she was raking in an estimated four million dollars a year - and reportedly had assets of ten million. 'Under her glossy facade,' commented a Paris banker, 'she is a shrewd, calculating peasant.' Her penchant for the common touch notwithstanding, Chanel rattled around in a mansion on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore and consorted with snooty cronies at their chateaux and ski chalets, or aboard their yachts in the Mediterranean. Yet she fiercely protected her individuality. When the Duke of Westminster asked her to marry him, she demurred, saying, 'There have been several duchesses of Westminster; there is only one Chanel.' "

delanceyplace.com 7/27/11 - young, humiliated, blind hitler vows to enter politics

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:59:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1918, after one final military assault that fails, Germany is defeated. Young Adolf Hitler, blind after a mustard gas attack, and humiliated after the Fatherland's defeat, vows to enter politics. His entry is part of a wave that carries Europe from royalty to revolution - sweeping aside those kings and emperors that had carried Europe into the unprecedented carnage of a pointless war:

"Throughout Europe royalty was clinging to hollow power. From the untitled masses were emerging men like Hitler who would come to wield the substance of power, men of common and often vulgar beginnings, riding the relentless wave of popular revolt against a war which had demanded sacrifices for goals no one could define.

"As the train took Hitler to a hospital in the Pomeranian town of Pasewalk, his own pain and despair obliterated any such aspiration, but after several weeks of medical treatment be began to regain his sight. Inflammation of the mucous membrane and swelling of the eyelids had receded; 'the piercing in my sockets' began to diminish and 'slowly I succeeded in distinguishing the broad outlines of things about me.' With sight came an end to depression and the mental instability that had required special treatment from a consulting psychiatrist, Professor Edmund Forster, chief of the Berlin University Nerve Clinic. Little was known about mustard gas and Hitler's inexplicable recovery confirmed Dr. Forster in his diagnosis of the blindness as hysteria. In fact, the patient had experienced the usual symptoms of moderate mustard gas poisoning - burning, swelling, moaning, depression - and recovery in several weeks.

"Sight also brought Hitler hope and renewed interest in the events of the day. Berlin itself was in a state of virtual siege as the new Chancellor urged the Kaiser to abdicate so that an armistice could be signed. Hitler had heard stories of rebellion throughout Germany but discounted them as rumor until a delegation of Red German sailors burst into his ward early that November in an attempt to convert the patients to the revolution. ... Indignation was followed by shock. Hitler took to his bed. 'I lay there broken with great pains, although I did not let on how I felt; for it was repugnant to me to cry out at a time when you could feel that the collapse was coming.' A little later, on November 9, a dignified elderly pastor arrived at Pasewalk hospital to confirm news of the uprisings. Revolution had even broken out in Munich.

"The patients were gathered in a little hall and the pastor, so Hitler recalled, 'seemed all a-tremble as be informed us that the House of Hohenzollern should no longer bear the German imperial crown; that the Fatherland had become a 'republic.' ' As the aged speaker eulogized the services rendered by the Hohenzollerns, he 'began to sob gently to himself - in the little hall the deepest dejection settled on all hearts, and I believe not an eye was able to restrain its tears.' The pastor went on to say that the war must now be ended, that all was lost and they had to throw themselves upon the mercy of the victorious Allies. To Hitler the revelation was intolerable. 'It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blankets and pillow.'

"It was the first time he had wept since standing at his mother's grave eleven years earlier (she had died in agony of cancer), in the churchyard of the Austrian village of Leonding. He had borne the fear of blindness 'in dull silence,' endured the loss of so many good comrades. 'But now I could not help it. Only now did I see how all personal suffering vanished in comparison with the misfortune of the Fatherland.' Out of his black despair came a decision. 'The great vacillation of my life, whether I should enter politics or remain an architect, came to an end. That night I resolved that, if I recovered my sight, I would enter politics.' There was no medical reason for Hitler's second blindness and Dr. Forster reinforced in his initial conclusion that his patient was definitely 'a psychopath with hysterical symptoms.' Hitler, however, was convinced he was permanently blind.

"The shame of Germany's surrender on November 11 in the forest of Compiegne overwhelmed him. Life seemed unbearable, but that night, or the next, Hitler was abruptly delivered from his misery, as he lay in despair on his cot, by a 'supernatural vision' (perhaps deliberately induced Dr. Forster). Like St. Joan, he heard voices summoning him to save Germany. All at once 'a miracle came to pass' - the darkness encompassing Hitler evaporated. He could see again! He solemnly vowed, as promised, that be would 'become a politician and devote his energies to carrying out the command he had received.' "

delanceyplace.com 7/26/11 - the first great awakening sweeps through america

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:26:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - twenty-six year old George Whitefield lands in America in 1739. Attractive, cross-eyed, and a brilliant orator, he arrived from England and took America by storm in the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening. Whitefield was among the first, and the most famous, of a new breed of preachers who de-emphasized denominational differences in favor of a "new birth" and the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. These preachers began holding their meetings outdoors to accommodate crowds that sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands:

"Philadelphia in 1739 was the second largest town in the colonies but still small at about thirteen thousand people. It was a fast-growing node of imperial commerce, receiving all manner of trade goods and immigrants every year. Although the pacifist Quaker politicians did not approve of Pennsylvania becoming directly involved with the War of Jenkins' Ear, which was declared a month before Whitefield's arrival, the Philadelphia traders made a good deal of money by providing supplies to the West Indies. The town was originally the centerpiece of William Penn's Quaker colony, but its free conditions led to quick religious pluralization. It became a particularly vital center for colonial Presbyterianism, but Philadelphia's Presbyterian Synod was not always friendly to revivalism.

"Whitefield brought William Seward with him to Philadelphia. Seward was a new convert who became the brains behind Whitefield's newspaper publicity. He was formerly the treasurer of the South Sea Company, which had used media promotion to grossly inflate its stock prices before their terrible crash in 1721. Seward had sworn off such practices, but he brought a businessman's savvy to marketing Whitefield's revivals. Both the Pennsylvania Gazette and the American Weekly Mercury, Philadelphia's two newspapers, covered Whitefield's departure from England. As in Britain, newspaper articles, both friendly and unfriendly, contributed to the Whitefield frenzy. Even during Whitefield's come much less significant, newspapers continued to follow his every move. Although publicity alone cannot account for Whitefield's unprecedented success, the media no doubt helped create his widespread attraction. Works by or about Whitefield caused the number of printed texts produced in America to almost double between 1738 and 1741.

"Whitefield's first order of business in Philadelphia was to meet the leaders of the Anglican Christ Church, where he 'read prayers and assisted at the Communion' on his first Sunday morning in Philadelphia. Whitefield would grow increasingly frustrated with the Anglican leaders' hostility toward him (as would Anglican leaders grow disgusted at Whitefield's incessant attacks), but it is instructive to see him seek out the Anglicans upon his arrival. He also attended the Quakers' meeting on Sunday night, perhaps wanting to touch base with all the religious power brokers in Philadelphia before beginning his field preaching. He did not relish the Quakers' devotion, however, and he was suspicious of their doctrine of the 'inward Christ.' He also began meeting with the city's Presbyterian and Baptist ministers.

"Having warmed up in Christ Church, Whitefield began preaching outdoors; on November 8 he 'preached at six in the evening, from the Court House stairs to about six thousand people,' or almost half the city's population. He thought that the people of Philadelphia were less formal than their countrymen in England, for they seemed to prefer his outdoor preaching. 'There, the generality of people think a sermon cannot be preached well without; here, they do not like it so well if delivered within the church walls.' These were just the sort of people Whitefield was looking for. The next night Whitefield preached again, to perhaps eight thousand people. ...

"Whitefield was simply a brilliant preacher, but he was also young and attractive, and all of this fed into his growing fame. As many of his portraits show, Whitefield also was cross-eyed, perhaps from a facial tic. His opponents sometimes used this feature to lampoon him, but some supporters seem to have associated this characteristic with spiritual power."

delanceyplace.com 7/25/11 - immigrants in america

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - at the turn of the twentieth century, a time of the greatest inward migration in American history, Ole and Hannah Didriksen and their small, destitute Norwegian family migrated to bleak, oil-drenched East Texas to seek riches from the new oil boom. Their as-yet-unborn daughter, later known to the world as Babe Didrikson, was to become one of the most acclaimed athletes in America history. But not before the Didriksens endured more poverty in America, and suffered the same mixture of hope and heartbreak suffered by millions of immigrants before and since:

"In January 1901 a gusher of oil erupted from the earth three miles south of Beaumont, Texas. Within a week, a black lake stretched over an area more than three hundred acres across. The Lucas Gusher, produced by the prick of a nearly worthless patch of land known as Spindletop, was soon churning out 100,000 barrels of oil a day.

"Practically overnight, everything - and everyone - in East Texas changed. Old cattlemen became oil wildcatters, and refineries were built on top of lumberyards. Beaumont started hustling. It seemed as if everywhere you looked, new drill holes, followed by new pipelines, were being carved out of the ground. Men and women who used to shuffle lazily along the streets began rushing everywhere, perspiring furiously in the scorching heat. No more dawdling - there was a boom to catch.

"Nothing moved faster than the price of land. A man who could not get $150 for a small chunk of scrubland back in 1898 sold it for $20,000 after the gusher. Fifteen minutes later, the buyer of the same piece of scrubland turned around and sold it for $50,000. It was crazy money, made crazier in just the time it took to change your overalls.

"In 1905, when Ole Nickolene Didriksen stepped off a Norwegian tanker docked at Port Arthur, just west of the Texas-Louisiana border, he explored the cluster of new towns busily pursuing the big oil hustle. He listened eagerly to the locals chattering about fresh oil and fast money. He soaked up the humid air, imagining that the warmth would allow his three small children - Ole Jr., Dora, and Esther - to spend most of their time outdoors. ('Get plenty of exercise,' Ole would tell his children, 'and keep your bowels clear.') Like the rest of the people in this newly minted patch of East Texas, Ole rushed toward a new and better life. Everything he saw was irresistible. East Texas was about as far from Oslo as you could get, but it did not take long for Ole to see that this was the perfect place to start over.

"The nation's immigration rules required him to live and work in the United States for three years before his family could join him, so the Didriksen family stayed behind in Oslo. Ole began working as an oddjobs carpenter based at the port. ... Within days of setting up shop at the port, Ole considered himself blessed. After work and on weekends, he built a sturdy wooden house for his family on a small patch of land on Seventh Street, in a development of homes owned by Gulf Oil. ... Beneath an eave, extending from the front porch, Ole put a metal flagpole, and each morning he unfurled the Stars and Stripes in the breeze. 'I'm a Norwegian,' he liked to say, 'but nobody's a prouder American than I am.'

"By the summer of 1908, Ole Didriksen was making enough money to support his family - barely. His wife, Hannah,and his three children arrived in Port Arthur on a muggy August afternoon. Hannah shielded her eyes from the hazy sun and looked suspiciously at the oil tankers belching fumes and the black oil rigs poking the big Texas sky. She smelled the stench of petroleum and listened to the gears grumbling inside the enormous refineries. Standing on the dock, surrounded by her children, her husband, and half a dozen travel cases, Hannah began to cry.

"My Momma, she told me that she couldn't believe what she seen - nothin' but oil, oil, oil, and she just couldn't stand it,' Babe's sister Lillie recalled years later. 'My Momma, she cried and cried and cried to think she had left beautiful, beautiful ol' Norway for this.' "

delanceyplace.com 7/22/11 - more countries and more wars

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

Today's excerpt comes from the pages of History Today - the number of wars fought each year (not including civil wars) is increasing, in no small part because the number of countries has increased, quadrupling since 1870 from 47 countries to 187 in 2001:

"New research by Professors Mark Harrison from the University of Warwick and Nikolaus Wolf from Humboldt University has revealed that between 1870 and 2001, the frequency of wars between states increased steadily by 2% a year on average. Between 1870 and 1913, the frequency of 'pairwise' conflicts (the numbers of pairs of countries involved in conflicts) increased on average by 6% per year. The frequency of wars increased by 17% per year in the period of the First and Second World Wars, and by 31% per year during the Cold War. In the 1990s, the frequency of wars between states rose by 36% per year.

"Professor Mark Harrison explained how: 'The number of conflicts has been rising on a stable trend. Because of two world wars, the pattern is obviously disturbed between 1914 and 1945 but remarkably, after 1945 the frequency of wars resumed its upward course on pretty much the same path as before 1913'....

"According to Harrison and Wolf, this increase in the frequency of pairwise conflicts can be explained by two principal factors: economic growth and the proliferation of borders. The number of countries has thus almost quadrupled since 1870, rising from 47 countries in 1870 to 187 in 2001.

"Harrison continued: 'More pairs of countries have clashed because there have been more pairs. This is not reassuring: it shows that there is a close connection between wars and the creation of states and new borders.'

"Looking specifically at the countries that have initiated disputes, the study shows that there is no tendency for richer countries (defined by a higher GDP per head) to make more frequent military interventions than others. The readiness to engage in war is spread relatively uniformly across the global income distribution.

"Thinkers of the Enlightenment believed, and many political scientists still believe today, that the political leaders of richer and more democratic countries have fewer incentives to go to war. Over the course of the twentieth century, on the whole, countries have become richer, more democratic and more interdependent. Yet, Harrison and Wolf's study disproves the theory that as GDP increases countries are less likely to engage in warfare."

delanceyplace.com 7/21/11 - the making of sports illustrated

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - Sports Illustrated. Time Magazine founder Henry Luce launched the new magazine Sports Illustrated in 1954, a time in which the biggest change in American life was the rapid growth of leisure and entertainment. The writing was superb - William Faulkner wrote an account of the 1955 Kentucky Derby - but it did not produce a profit until its tenth year:

"By the spring of 1953 Luce was once again in what [employee John Shaw] Billings called 'an empire-building mood,' which usually meant launching a new magazine. And even though Luce had never been very much interested in sports or wilderness activities himself, he began to imagine a 'sporting- magazine' that would capture what he believed was a growing market for leisure, and thus for sports. ... Some of his colleagues were aghast at the idea, convinced that a sports magazine would degrade the Time Inc. brand by focusing on trivial and consumer-driven activities. ... Other colleagues were similarly dubious about the project, and many of them told Luce bluntly that he was making a dangerous error. He was not impervious to these criticisms, and at times he wavered in his commitment. ...

"Throughout the development stage of the magazine, the working title was 'Sport.' There was, however, already a magazine using that name, which had offered to sell itself to Time Inc. for $ 250,000, more than Luce was willing to pay. In May, with the publication date approaching, Harry Phillips, the Time Inc. publisher of the as yet unnamed magazine, ran into a friend in a restaurant who offered an alternative. The friend owned the title of a defunct magazine, Sports Illustrated. Everyone involved was immediately enthusiastic, and the company purchased the name for five thousand dollars. ...

"From the start Luce expected Sports Illustrated to be unprecedented. It would not be a 'fan' magazine, filled with gossip, adulation, and over-the-top language. It would not compete with the daily newspaper coverage of sports. It would not focus too much on what had happened in the previous week. ... It would look at sports not just as fun but, Luce wrote, as something that was 'deeply inherent ... in the human spirit.' ...

"The first issue of Sports Illustrated was published on August 16, 1954, a few days after issues actually appeared on newsstands. It sold out quickly. ... The first story in this first issue, 'The Duel of the Four-Minute Men,' chronicled the classic rivalry between Roger Bannister and John Landy, the first two men to run a four-minute mile. It also illustrated how unconventional a sports magazine it intended to be. 'The art of running the mile consists, in essence, of reaching the threshold of unconsciousness at the instant of breasting the tape,' the Sports Illustrated writer Paul O'Neil began:

" 'It is not an easy process ... for the body rebels against such agonizing usage and must be disciplined by the spirit and the mind. ... Few events in sport offer so ultimate a test of human courage and human will and human ability to dare and endure for the simple sake of struggle.'

"This elegant and sophisticated language was a sign of what Sports Illustrated aspired to be, and often accomplished - a magazine that would elevate the world of sports from being 'just a game' to being a powerful metaphor for the human condition. ... On February 21, 1955, the magazine ran a cover of a smiling young woman in an unrevealing swimsuit (part of a feature on sports fashion) - an augury of one of the magazine's most popular and sometimes controversial features of later decades.

"Luce took particular pride in the quality of the writers he could attract to Sports Illustrated. The revered New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling submitted an elegant essay on Stillman's Gymnasium in New York City, where many notable boxers were trained. Wallace Stegner wrote an elegy to Yosemite National Park. Budd Schulberg wrote a sympathetic story about an aging prizefighter who was finally making it big. John Steinbeck insisted he could not write for Sports Illustrated because 'my interests are too scattered and too unorthodox.' But he wrote a long letter on his eclectic interest in sports that the magazine published anyway. And William Faulkner wrote an extraordinary (and predictably unorthodox) account of the 1955 Kentucky Derby. ...

"Circulation exceeded five hundred thousand in every issue in 1954, rose to six hundred thousand the following year, and climbed steadily through most of its history (to more than three million a week in 2009). It quickly established itself as by far the most famous and influential sports magazine ever published in the United States. ... Not until 1964, however, ten years after its first issue, did Sports Illustrated produce its first profit."

delanceyplace.com 7/20/11 - the diamond rush

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 09:00:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1870, with the discovery of diamonds in the British colony in South Africa, young Brits swarmed south to seek their fortunes. Among them was seventeen-year-old Cecil Rhodes, forgoing a life in the clergy, traveling to join his older brother Herbert. Rhodes, who would rise to dominate the diamond mines and build one of the world's great fortunes, showed immediate promise. Though his name is remembered through his Rhodes Scholarships and the nation that was once named Rhodesia, he left behind a legacy of corruption and the seeds of apartheid:

"An astute observer of trends, Cecil, still only seventeen years old, realized that the cotton boom was drawing to a close and decided to join [his brother] Herbert on his diamond claim in Colesberg Kopje, a region later renamed Kimberley, after the British secretary of state for the colonies. He set off on the 650-kilometre trek in October with high hopes, which were soon dashed. His pony died during the journey, and Cecil struggled on foot for the entire gruelling distance, plodding from dawn to dusk for about twenty kilometres a day under the crushing weight of his supplies. He arrived in November at the squalid sprawl of the new mining community, then on its way to becoming the second-largest settlement in southern Africa. For a youth used to the middle- class amenities of England, it must have been an eye-opening experience.

"Thousands of recent arrivals dwelt in the blasting heat without running water or sanitation. One traveller described 'dust so thick that the sufferer fears to remove it lest the raising of it may aggravate the evil, and of flies so numerous that one hardly dares to slaughter them by ordinary means lest their dead bodies should be noisome.' Hot winds swirled the dust into great clouds that covered everything so 'that it would seem that the solid surface of the earth had risen diluted into the air ... In Kimberley and its surrounding nothing was pretty.'

"The inhabitants, more than half of them black Africans, toiled in appalling conditions and were housed in corrugated iron sheds or dirty canvas tents that were crammed together in makeshift rows. The workers sustained themselves on rancid meat and butter and wilted vegetables, 'it is like an immense number of ant-heaps covered with black ants, as thick as can be,' Rhodes wrote in a letter to his mother; 'the latter represented by human beings; when you understand that there are about 600 claims on the kopje [small hill], and each claim is generally split into four, and on each bit there are about six blacks and whites working, it gives a total of about ten thousand working every day on a piece of ground 180 yards by 220.' ...

"Many of the assorted hangers-on were veterans of mining booms from around the world: tradesmen, vagabonds, shady merchants, cattle dealers, thieves, whores and gamblers. Meanwhile, most of the physical labour was done by thousands of transient Bantu labourers who were earning money to buy cattle or wives or guns before returning to their homelands. Drunkenness and gambling were the chief pastimes in the rowdy community, but apparently it suited Rhodes. He settled in, assumed responsibility for one of his brother's three claims and got to work. Soon his ne'er-do-well brother was off again, back to the cotton farm, apparently uninterested in the tedium and drudgery of life at the mines, leaving the now eightcen-year-old Cecil in charge. The younger brother prospered, digging his pit ever deeper and sifting though the dirt to gain about a hundred pounds of diamonds each week.

"When Herbert returned [after a trip to sell his unsuccessful cotton farm], ... he was astounded at Cecil's progress and at his force of will. Even when he was in a violent dispute with a much older prospector whose claim encroached on his a little, Cecil showed no signs of backing down. He had learned how to hire and fire workers, grade the diamonds, haul the 'pay dirt,' fend off interlopers and deal with unscrupulous diamond brokers. 'Cecil seems to have done wonderfully well as regards the diamonds,' Herbert reported home."

delanceyplace.com 7/19/11 - america's success bring the second great awakening

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the birth of a new and free nation in the American Revolution - coupled with the innovations of the Industrial Revolution - brought explosive growth and massive immigration to the United States. That growth, however, brought enormous stress and dislocation to the citizens of the young country. The Second Great Awakening, which blazed across the country from the 1790s to the 1840s, was in large part a reaction to this:

"Most of the American revolutionaries believed that their war against the British was backed by God. Benjamin Franklin asked: 'If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?' During the War of Independence, Congress approved the purchase of 20,000 Bibles from Holland to distribute to citizens. Six of the 13 original states had an established church. Central government funded missionary activity among Native Americans. The words 'separation', 'church' and 'state' were not put into the Constitution. Any language the Founders inserted into the Constitution with reference to faith was designed to protect churches from interference by the state, not the other way around. While the American Revolution was full of Enlightenment ideas and language, the average citizen remained closer in spirit to the Puritans than to the Jacobins of France.

"American society changed greatly in the early 19th century. Better transport and industrialisation turned some settlements into cities and others into backward dustbowls. Mass immigration undermined community cohesion; urban growth brought sin. Prostitution, crime and public drunkenness were common. Wage-slavery and debt became a reality of life for a people for whom the American dream meant being an independent farmer. It was in reaction to this confusion that there emerged the definitive American revival movement, one that set the themes and modes of modern US politics.

"From the 1790s to the 1840s there was a remarkable explosion of revivalist activity called the Second Great Awakening. It favoured new churches over the old and the number of Baptist and Methodist preachers tripled. Millennarian- ism flourished. One centre of intense activity was upstate New York, which earned the title of the Burned-over District because there was nobody left to convert by the end of the period. In that region the Millerites preached that Jesus would return on October 22nd, 1844. When the day fell it became known as the Great Disappointment, for obvious reasons. The Shakers rejected clergy and lived in communes, banning marriage and practicing strict celibacy (in 1840 their denomination boasted 6,000 members; today there are only three). Perhaps the most patriotic denomination was the Mormon Latter-day Saints movement [which was founded in New York and later moved to Utah], whose members believed that Jesus had actually walked on American soil.

"In 1829 an English tourist, Frances Trollope, visited a revivalist camp meeting in Indiana. She was horrified by what she saw. Fifteen clergymen preached to 2,000 people in rotation from Tuesday to Saturday. They passed through tents, all of which 'were strewn with straw, and the distorted figures that we saw kneeling, sitting and lying amongst it, joined to the woeful and convulsive cries, gave to each the air of a cell in Bedlam.' Although the tents were segregated by race, Trollope noticed that preachers attended to as many blacks as whites. She was particularly scandalized by the presence of women. ...

"Trollope concluded that such behaviour in England would result in 'instant punishment ... not to mention the salutary discipline of the treadmill'. Revivalism burned through England too, but Anglican and Catholic critics noted that the existence of a national church seemed to temper its influence upon government. A combination of too much freedom and too much faith, in their estimation, created a frantic theocracy."

delanceyplace.com 7/18/11 - a woman's brain changes with the birth of a child

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:31:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - a new and growing body of research is revealing that there are marked and generally positive physiological changes that occur in a mother's brain as a result of giving birth to a child. Experiments and observations on human mothers and laboratory rats provide the evidence:

"Research suggests that motherhood enhances certain types of cognition, improves resistance to stress and sharpens some kinds of memory. On the face of it, the fact that the nervous system manages to transform a new mother from a self-centered organism into an other-focused caregiver is actually quite impressive. All it takes is for new neurons to sprout, certain brain structures to blossom in size and waves of powerful hormones to batter the pregnant woman's physiology. The result is a different and in some ways better brain - or at least one capable of juggling the challenges of everyday life while maintaining a laserlike focus on the baby.

"Of all the senses, smell-olfaction-plays the largest role in reproduction. Females rely on their sense of smell from the very beginning to help them select their mates all the way through to the weaning of their young, during which scents act as a form of communication between mother and child. An extreme example of the power of smell is known as the Bruce effect, a pheno- menon in which certain scents induce abortions in pregnant rodents. If a female's mate disappears after conception and an interloper starts hanging around, the new male's smell will inhibit the production of key hormones, causing the female's pregnancy to abort. Otherwise, chances are high that the interloper would end up killing and eating the pups, thereby obtaining a high-protein meal and removing a rival's genes in the bargain. ...

"During a rat's pregnancy, for example, we know that the olfactory system starts churning out new neurons. The theory is that the extra neurons allow moms to become more adept at processing the cues hidden in infant odors. Indeed, mothers distinguish themselves quite obviously in how they react to smells. Whereas virgin female rats find the odors of infants noisome, once they become pregnant, those smells attract them. ...

"Mother rats seem to excel at tasks that require enhanced attention. Behavioral neuroscientist Kelly Lambert of Randolph-Macon College and her colleagues have collected other evidence of sharp-witted mothers. In 2009 they showed that when it comes to identifying which cue among several signals food, mother rats perform best. And recent work by Amy Au and Tommy Bilinski in our lab has begun to identify the rats' strengthened ability to deduce the meanings of symbols. The researchers designed experiments where a rat in an environment learns to associate, say, a triangle or a set of wavy lines with a food reward. After being moved to a new environment, lactating females transferred their knowledge from the old setting to the new one better than virgin females did, again suggesting a heightened attention to detail.

"A human mother's brain undergoes a striking structural metamorphosis, too. Last year using magnetic resonance imaging studies, neuroscientist Pilyoung Kim, now at the National Institute of Mental Health, and her colleagues found significant increases in gray matter in mothers' brains in the weeks and months after they give birth. Gray matter, which got its name from the color of cell bodies, is a layer of tissue packed with neurons. The growth the scientists saw was particularly visible in the midbrain, parietal lobes and prefrontal cortex - all areas involved in infant care. The mothers with the biggest increase in gray matter volume also reported the more positive perception of their babies.

"As the time of delivery nears, powerful hormones swing into action. Although the most obvious players are oxytocin, which stimulates uterine contractions and milk letdown, and prolactin, which instigates milk production, other hormones trigger changes inside the brain, too. ... Meanwhile the hypo- thalamus ramps up the feelings of pleasure a mother receives. Robert S. Bridges of the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and his colleagues found different concentrations of opioid receptors in female rats depending on whether the rodent was a virgin, pregnant or lactating. ... The drug analogy, by the way, is not spurious. Animals may in fact be engaging in maternal behavior simply because it feels good. Many human mothers report a very pleasurable feeling as they breastfeed their infants. After pups attach to a female rat's nipple, the mom receives a 'hit' of reinforcing opiate."

delanceyplace.com 7/15/11 - europe's beautiful bridges

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:54:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - some of Europe's most beautiful bridges - the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the Old London Bridge, the Rialto Bridge in Venice - were evidence of the trade and wealth that was pulling Europe out of its feudal past and toward a market economy, a transition known as the Commercial Revolution. Trade was most pronounced on rivers, especially where those rivers were near the sea, and new bridges were built throughout the continent. Houses, shops, and marketplaces were built on top of these bridges, and the lenders who set up their shops on the river banks adjacent to these bridges - the "banchieri" in Italian - gave us the modern word "bank":

"Urban hubs throbbing with new market activity rose to prominence starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Wherever navigable waterways converged or where key river crossing or favorable harbors were established, influential urban commercial centers arose. The most vibrant cluster in northern Europe was in the Low Countries, where the navigable Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers flowed near one another. It included the ports of Ghent, the largest city with 50,000 inhabitants in the fourteenth century, Bruges, Antwerp, and later Amsterdam; other big centers included Lubeck, London, and Paris. This was mirrored in Mediterranean Europe by a cluster of large northern Italian city-states, above all Venice, Genoa, Milan, and Florence, with populations surpassing 100,000.

"Due to the overriding importance of water navigation, it was no accident that the central marketplaces of Europe's Commercial Revolution developed literally on top of and alongside the bridges and quays of the leading medieval towns and city-states. Like towns, bridges underwent a major building boom from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, often becoming each town's pulsing central marketplace. Shops and houses located around the bridges enjoyed the further medieval privilege of having at hand a common drinking water and sewage disposal source in the river below. Crowded with shops and markets were the late twelfth-century Old London Bridge across the Thames, the Grand Pont across the Seine, also featuring 13 floating water mills moored below its arches where the river flowed fastest to produce fourteenth-century Paris's daily bread flour, and the stone bridge that still crosses the Arno at Florence, the Ponte Vecchio.

"Many pioneering early bridges were built by monastic orders, including the famous, 20-arched, Pont d'Avignon across the notoriously flooding Rhone in southern France that was erected in the late twelfth century by the Freres Pontifes, (Brothers of the Bridge). As bridges became a practical amenity that enhanced town trade and commerce, civic authorities undertook the responsibility for building many of them. This helped revive the Roman practice of public infrastructure investment, which became a mainstay of the West's liberal, democratizing marriage of convenience between governments and private markets.

"Few bridges were at the center of so much important medieval commerce as Venice's Rialto Bridge, the lone crossing over the Grand Canal at the heart of the greatest Mediterranean sea trading power of the age. The first wooden Rialto Bridge was built in 1264, replacing an old pontoon crossing. Several wooden iterations later, the late sixteenth-century stone bridge was erected, crammed then as today with two arcades of noisy shops and businesses bustling along its banks. Bakers, butchers, fishmongers, fruit and vegetable sellers, acrobats and other entertainers, and even the infirm in their beds at the hospice were conspicuous daily sights.

"Upon closer look, the hierarchical skeleton structure of early market capitalism itself was physically visible beneath the manifold relationships of the merchants of Venice crowded around the Rialto: the small merchants haggling over price and exchanging goods for money on the bridge within earshot of the larger wholesale suppliers who bought, sold, and signed trade and shipping contracts every morning nearby in their loggia, or meeting room - an early commodities exchange - and who then later in the day walked a few paces to the narrow bank counter stalls of the banchieri - the 'bankers' - who settled their transactions by book entry account fund transfers and reinvested the accumulated capital profits of the marketplace in a new circuit of loans and ownership stakes in fresh speculative ventures."

delanceyplace.com 7/14/11 - studying sex

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:12:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - Alfred Kinsey, and later William Masters and Virginia Johnson, endured rejection and ridicule to publish what ultimately became recognized as groundbreaking studies on human sexuality:

"Kinsey is of course best known for his daring, encyclopedic surveys of sexual behavior. In the 1940s and early '50s, Kinsey - with colleagues Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard - interviewed 18,000 Americans about their sex lives and published his findings in two ground-breaking, best-selling, ultimately career-tanking volumes. ...

"[Kinsey's studies included] stutterers, amputees, paraplegics, even those with cerebral palsy. Kinsey wanted to document the full spectrum of human sexuality, but it was more than that. He believed these people might have things to teach us about the physiology of sex. And he was right. These groups alerted Kinsey - and the scientific community as a whole - to the complicated and crucial role of the central nervous system in sex and reproduction. Kinsey had noted that a stutterer in the throes of sexual abandon may temporarily lose his stutter. Similarly, the phantom limb pain some amputees feel temporarily disappears. Even the muscle spasticity of cerebral palsy may be briefly quieted. The body's limiting factors seem to get shut off. The organism is driven toward nature's singular goal - conception, the passing on of one's genes - and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background. Sensory distractions become imperceptible: noises go unheeded and peripheral vision all but disappears - a fact some prostitutes use to their advantage, working with 'creepers' who emerge from the shadows when the action heats up and go through the john's pockets as easily as if he were unconscious. The most dramatic example of this biological priority shift is a sexually mediated disregard for pain and physical discomfort. Whatever ails you pretty much stops ailing you during really hot sex. ...

"It was 1954 when William Masters embarked on his own investigation of sexual physiology. Kinsey was under fire from conservatives. The Rockefeller Foundation, partly because of its funding of Kinsey's work, was the subject of a congressional investigation. (As a result, the foundation pulled Kinsey's funding. He died less than two years later.)

"Given the political climate, it was exceedingly brave of Masters - then a gynecologist at Washington University in St. Louis - to undertake such a project. This was to be a large (nearly 700 participants), nonclandestine observational study of human sexual arousal and orgasm. To try to get funding and permission for such a venture in 1954 must have been, well, like trying to do it [today]. Understandably, Masters went to great lengths to appear as scientific, objective, and morally upstanding as he could. His hiring of a female associate, Virginia Johnson, helped ward off accusations of impropriety. ...

"Masters and Johnson launched their book-length write-up of the project, Human Sexual Response, in 1966. (Medical journals had rejected the team's papers, deeming them pornographic.) 'The hate mail was unbelievable,' Masters recalled during a talk at the 1983 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex. 'For the next year and a half we had extra secretaries ... just answering mail.' Eventually, the rancor cooled, and the book went on to become an enduring bestseller and a classic in the field. It is hard to say which contributed most to its acceptance: the cloak of formal science that Masters so assiduously pinned to his work, or the simple fact that times had changed. Nineteen sixty-six was worlds away from 1954."

delanceyplace.com 7/13/11 - quakers, temperance, and solitary confinement

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Quaker and other religious influences in Philadelphia in the early 1800s contributed to two catastrophic social experiments—the temperance movement and solitary confinement. Though both stemmed from good intentions, the temperance movement found an unexpected ally in early industrialists, who viewed it as a way to curb workers from drinking during work. And solitary confinement, which was viewed by its proponents as more humane than physical punishment, was immediately recognized by visitors such as Charles Dickens as "dreadful":

"Just as education was closely connected with evangelical religion, so was the temperance movement, one of the pillars of the house of reform but one of the least successful. By 1841, the city and county of Philadelphia boasted nineteen temperance societies, which advocated moderation in the consumption of alcohol, and seven total abstinence societies. Many others formed later. Like most other social reform movements, temperance had two faces: one as the reformers saw it; another as seen by the objects of the reformers' zeal. Temperance and abstinence advocates saw demon rum as the main cause poverty; the poor saw it an opiate from misery. Whether a cause or an effect of poverty, the use of liquor complicated industrial labor. From the employer's point of view, the laborer's age-old use of spirits during work breaks had no place in a new industrial world; it could only lead to drunkenness on the job and habitual absenteeism.

"But most workingmen saw it differently. To them it was clear that the evangelical Presbyterians who led the temperance movement also spoke for the capitalist mill owners, who drove down wages and forced workers to strike for a living wage. 'My company all drank a little,' observed Benjamin Sewell, a Philadelphia tanner and local labor leader, 'but "nothing to hurt," we used to say.' Some temperance societies originated among the working classes themselves. But most were directed from above, and most were resented for the stiff moralism of their Protestant clergymen leaders, who rarely stood with labor on issues of wages, hours, workplace safety, and public education. Membership in the temperance societies probably never exceeded twenty thousand in a city whose population rose above half a million by 1860. ...

"If not the national leader in temperance reform, Philadelphia was indisputably the leader in penal reform. Under Quaker influence, colonial Pennsylvania had abolished the death penalty except for the most heinous crimes and in 1794 limited capital punishment to first-degree murder. Public whipping was abandoned in 1786. Four years later, public labor—convicts were chained to wheelbarrows as they performed street repairs—was replaced with imprisonment. Convinced that reflection and contemplation were the keys to reforming criminals, ... reformers laid the cornerstone for the massive Eastern State Penitentiary in the northern district of the city in 1823. Constructed to contain every prisoner in strict solitary confinement, the granite fortress represented a half century of thinking about how to rehabilitate criminals. Reformers believed that when the state inflicted bodily punishment, ferocious criminals became even more violent. Instead, freed from prison brawling and violent treatment by guards, convicts would learn to be penitent in solitude and then eventually reclaim themselves as useful members of society.

"The attempt to modify criminal behavior at Cherry Hill [the Eastern State Penitentiary] drew national and international attention. Nearly every out-of-town visitor, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, and Charles Dickens, toured Cherry Hill. Most were horrified at what they found. Dickens, who was allowed to go from cell to cell to talk with the prisoners, called it 'a most dreadful fearful place.' He wrote in his American Notes that the 'benevolent gentlemen' who constructed the system of solitary confinement 'do not know what it is that they are doing,' and he judged 'daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.' Called 'a crucible of good intentions" by a recent historian, Cherry Hill failed to meet its creators hopes—the 'means of restoring our fellow-creatures to virtue and happiness.' "

delanceyplace.com 7/12/11 - marlon brando as the godfather

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - legendary movie critic Pauline Kael wrote the following passage about Marlon Brando in The New Yorker as part of her 1972 review of the then newly-released movie, The Godfather:

"The enormous cast is headed by Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone, the 'godfather' of a powerful Sicilian-American clan, with James Caan as his hothead son, Sonny, and Al Pacino as the thoughtful, educated son, Michael. Is Brando marvellous? Yes, he is, but then he often is; he was marvellous a few years ago in Reflections in a Golden Eye, and he's shockingly effective as a working-class sadist in a current film, The Nightcomers, though the film itself isn't worth seeing. The role of Don Vito - a patriarch in his early sixties - allows him to release more of the gentleness that was so seductive and unsettling in his braggart roles.

"Don Vito could be played as a magnificent old warrior, a noble killer, a handsome bull-patriarch, but Brando manages to debanalize him. It's typical of Brando's daring that he doesn't capitalize on his broken-prow profile and the massive, sculptural head that has become the head of Rodin's Balzac - he doesn't play for statuesque nobility. The light, cracked voice comes out of a twisted mouth and clenched teeth; he has the battered face of a devious, combative old man, and a pugnacious thrust to his jaw. The rasp in his voice is particularly effective after Don Vito has been wounded; one almost feels that the bullets cracked it, and wishes it hadn't been cracked before. Brando interiorizes Don Vito's power, makes him less physically threatening and deeper, hidden within himself.

"Brando's acting has mellowed in recent years; it is less immediately exciting than it used to be, because there's not the sudden, violent discharge of emotion. His effects are subtler, less showy, and he gives himself over to the material. He appears to have worked his way beyond the self-parody that was turning him into a comic, and that sometimes left the other performers dangling and laid bare the script. He has not acquired the polish of most famous actors; just the opposite - less mannered as he grows older, he seems to draw directly from life, and from himself. His Don is a primitive sacred monster, and the more powerful because he suggests not the strapping sacred monsters of movies (like Anthony Quinn) but actual ones - those old men who carry never-ending grudges and ancient hatreds inside a frail frame, those monsters who remember minute details of old business deals when they can no longer tie their shoelaces.

"No one has aged better on camera than Brando; he gradually takes Don Vito to the close of his life, when he moves into the sunshine world, a sleepy monster, near to innocence again. The character is all echoes and shadings, and no noise; his strength is in that armor of quiet. Brando has lent Don Vito some of his own mysterious, courtly reserve: the character is not explained; we simply assent to him and believe that, yes, he could become a king of the underworld. Brando doesn't dominate the movie, yet he gives the story the legendary presence needed to raise it above gang warfare to archetypal tribal warfare."

delanceyplace.com 7/11/11 - class at the culinary institute

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:18:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the Culinary Institute of America, perhaps the finest chef college in the world, includes among its many courses a class in killing the animals that will later be served as the culinary offerings of its students. Jonathan Dixon, a student at the Hyde Park, New York, campus, describes the experience:

"[My classmates] Adam, Lombardi, and I all signed up to go and kill animals the following Friday. Meat class would be over, and we'd be in the thick of fish class - Seafood Identification and Fabrication. But this was something necessary. If I really asked myself some tough questions, which I did in the days going forward, I realized that the truism was right: Unless you're a vegan or hard-core vegetarian, if you are going to consume animal flesh, then you should kill an animal. Not just watch the killing and the flow of blood, not be an observer, but touch an animal and end its life. ...

"The farm [where the class would be held] had a dirt driveway that cut through green fields, and a few yards down from the road a sign read WELCOME CIA STUDENTS AND BROOK FARM FRIENDS. For most of the ride, the four of us in the car had talked food, [restaurateur] Thomas Keller and the cult of celebrity, run down other students we didn't care for, and generally avoided the topic of killing. With the farmhouse in sight the conversation swerved down a darker bend; we made jokes that weren't all that funny and laughed too hard at them. We parked the car, gathered the knives, and took heavy steps to the backyard.

"As we walked toward a set of tables to put our things down, we passed a mobile chicken coop, presumably filled with the work at hand. A dozen or so feet beyond that was a fifty-five-gallon drum full of bubbling water on top of a propane burner, and next to it a cylindrical tube with finger-sized rubber pieces extruding off the interior sides and on the bottom. Nearby were a few tubs filled with water. And throwing their shadows onto the tables were six traffic cones upended and nailed to a crossbeam. ... I had a good idea what the traffic cones were for. Beneath the cones, someone had dug a trench about six inches deep. On this assembly line, no one part of the process was more than a few feet from another. ...

"By the coop there were two wooden cages. The [farm owner] took a few of us to the coop, crawled inside, and handed out chickens two at a time. Six chickens were put into each cage. The cages were carried back to the crossbeams; we reached in and each picked up a chicken by its feet and held it upside down - if held that way long enough, chickens go into a trance; they'll fight you, though, when you first try to turn them feet up. Once they were sedated, we drew them headfirst through one of the cones. Sebald spoke his softly accented instructions: Hold the head with your thumb under the chicken's beak. Put the bottom end of the knife blade against the bird's throat. Draw the blade across, applying firm, even pressure. The head should pop right off. All of us stood thronged together, knives in hand, waiting. The first bird went into the cone. ...

"That first bird: a young woman from school was the first to kill, and it didn't go as well as it could have. The knife seemed to stick; the bird freaked out; she responded in kind but got the knife through the neck. She had blood running down her cheeks and held the head in her hand. She was blameless; it's hard for your hands to know what to do. In the cluster of students around her, I saw one of the teaching assistants from school, her eyes also shining with tears. Most of us were shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. I held my knife with a tight grip. Other students were reaching into the cages and pulling out the chickens. I watched people lifting the birds up, watched their wings flap frantically, heard them squawking, saw them being killed. ...

"My turn came. I could feel the bird's pulse under my thumb. I positioned the knife as instructed and drew it hard across the chicken's throat. And then I was holding its head in my hand, blood on my arms and shirt, watching the body convulse. My foot slipped and slid into the trench. My work boot was glistening with blood.

"The body was dunked into the same hot water that had cooked the corn. When the feathers began pulling away, it was removed from the water and put into the cylinder. The cylinder whipped the bird around and the rubber extrusions pulled away the feathers. Any feathers left were plucked by hand at a nearby table. Then we gutted the chickens, the viscera still hot. The carcass was then washed and put into a tub. We went through this for hours, until past dusk, stopping when the hundredth chicken was finished. ...

"At the end of the [class], the husband and wife [who owned the farm] asked us to gather in a circle and tell them what we'd learned. One by one, we each mouthed the same platitudes about respect for food, being closer to the food source, and like that. But what I actually learned I still only feel."

delanceyplace.com 7/8/11 - george steinbrenner's red phone

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Bill White, an African American and five time All Star baseball player whose recent book Uppity recounts his times playing baseball in the racist south, his years as a broadcaster for the New York Yankees, and his tenure as President of the National League, tells of a run-in with George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner, who bought the Yankees in 1973 for $10 million and turned it into the billion dollar franchise it is today, had a reputation as the most hands on manager in modern baseball history and was feared for the abusive way he treated his employees, "screaming and cursing at them, summarily firing them for little or no reason, publicly humiliating them." (It was Steinbrenner of whom one of his limited partners, John McMullen, once said, "Nothing in life is so limited as being the limited partner of George Steinbrenner."):

"George Steinbrenner's determination to control everything about the New York Yankees didn't end with the team itself. He not only wanted to control the Yankees, he wanted to control what was said about the Yankees - not just by sports reporters, who routinely found themselves frozen out when they displeased Steinbrenner, but also by broadcasters in the Yankees booth. Steinbrenner had a red phone installed in the broadcast booth so he could always be sure to get through when he heard something he didn't like. When that red phone rang, everybody knew it was Steinbrenner - and that he was pissed off. ...

"Steinbrenner made no secret of the fact that he wanted homers broadcasting his Yankees' games - and [my broadcast partner] Phil Rizzuto was a true homer, unable to hide his love of the Yankees and his joy when they won. I'm not criticizing Phil for that. That was simply the way he was, and it worked for him.

"But I was another story.

"Unlike Phil, I didn't have an emotional attachment to the Yankees, as a player or as a broadcaster. My job was to call the games as I saw them. If the Yankees played well I said so, and if they didn't, I said that, too. But Steinbrenner wanted something else.

" 'Why can't White be more like Rizzuto?' he would ask the broadcast producers. As diplomatically as possible - most of them were afraid of Steinbrenner's rages - they would explain that the broadcast needed straight play-by-play to balance Phil's homer-ish style. And in any event, they would say, 'Nobody's going to change Bill White.'

"Still, the calls from Steinbrenner to the broadcast booth came in during almost every game. A production assistant whose job it was to monitor the red phone would take the calls and write down Steinbrenner's demands and then pass the notes to whoever was calling the game.

"If an umpire blew a call to the Yankees' disadvantage, Steinbrenner would want us to rip the ump, If a Yankees player who was in Steinbrenner's doghouse bobbled a play, Steinbrenner would want us to question his playing abilities and value to the team. With managers especially, if the Yankees were doing badly Steinbrenner would want us to knock the manager's decisions on-air. Sometimes he seemed to think that such on-air critiques would actually be a motivational exercise, driving the player or manager to do better. At other times Steinbrenner, who was notorious for using the news media to communicate his displeasure with a player or manager, apparently wanted to use us to validate his intentions to get rid of a guy.

"But whatever his motives, I wouldn't go along. The first few times I got the notes, I ignored them. Finally I told the young production assistant, 'Tell the Skipper I'm not even going to read this note.' Given Steinbrenner's temper, that probably wasn't fair to the production assistant. (Most people who worked for Steinbrenner called him either 'Mr. Steinbrenner' or 'Boss'; he would get furious if an underling had the temerity to call him 'George.' I didn't call him any of those. Since he owned a shipping company, and sometimes wore a captain's hat, I always called him 'Skipper.')

"The notes from Steinbrenner kept coming, and I continued to ignore them. Then suddenly one day they stopped. When I asked the production assistant why, he said, "Mr. Steinbrenner is still calling in the notes. He just told me not to give them to you anymore."

"That was fine with me."

delanceyplace.com 7/7/11 - bacteria has been sent

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 09:32:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - bacteria:

"It's probably not a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes. Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass, a habit that presumaby did not win him many repeat invitations to dinner.

"In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains—about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you B.O.

"And those are just the bacteria that inhabit your skin. There are trillions more tucked away in your gut and nasal passages, clinging to you hair and eyelashes, swimming over the surface of your eyes, drilling through the enamel of your teeth. Your digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes, of at least four hundred types. Some deal with sugars, some with starches, some attack other bacteria. A surprising number, like the ubiquitous intestinal spirochetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you. Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.

"Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

"Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn't survive a day without them. ... And they are amazingly prolific. The more frantic among them can yield a new generation in less than ten minutes; Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes. At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe. 'Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,' according to the Belgian biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve. In the same period, a human cell can just about manage a single division."

delanceyplace.com 7/5/11 - hank williams dies at twenty-nine

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Hank Williams (1923 - 1953), the brightest light in country music history and a true avatar of America's rural roots, died in the back of a moving car in the early morning hours of New Year's Day, 1953, at twenty-nine. He lived hard—drugs and alcohol, his hardscrabble upbringing, health problems, and his stormy marriage to Audrey spilled out in his songs. The first unabashed country music sex symbol, his leg gyrations and other stage movements were radical for their day. He was overlooked by official Nashville, there were only four mentions of Hank Williams in the Nashville newspapers during his lifetime. They left the Opry and the burgeoning music business to their own devices in those days—it was only "hillbilly" music, after all, something the pooh-bahs of the "Athens of the South" still held with contempt. But the working classes had lost their poet, a proletarian prophet who had touched their souls with his simple heart-breaking lyrics. That was Hank's true audience, the waitresses and the route salesmen and the farmers and the truck drivers of the world, and they began to be heard from almost immediately in their clamor to buy his records in the aftermath of his passing. Of his ten No.1 records, four of them came in the six months following his death:

"Nighttime had fallen in the Smoky Mountains. Hank was worn out, partly from the beer and nips of bourbon and the residue of alcohol that by now was nearly always present in his system, and he and Charley Carr [the teenager he had hired for the night to drive him] arrived at the Andrew Johnson Hotel at seven o'clock, about the time the show would have been opening in Charleston [had the snowstorm not delayed them]. Two porters had to assist Hank to the room they shared.

"The teenaged driver now had a genuine crisis on his hands. They were more than five hundred miles from Canton, up in northern Ohio, and he assumed the weather was much the same between there and Knoxville. The first thing he did was order two steaks from room service, and Hank took only a few bites before going to steep, finally rolling off the bed and falling onto the floor. When Hank began hiccuping, sending his body into convulsions, Carr's call to the front desk summoned a doctor, who came to the room and injected two shots, one of vitamin B6 and one of B12.

"Then Carr managed to contact the promoter, one A.V. Bamford, who told him the Charleston show might be canceled and strongly advised that they get back into the car and continue driving to Canton; the two o'clock matinee was a sellout, four thousand tickets already sold at $2.50 each, and if Hank didn't make it he would owe $1,000 on a penalty clause. The doctor who had given Hank the vitamin shots said he was okay to travel, so at 10:30 a porter came to the room with a wheelchair, sat Hank in it, and delivered him to the car. Hank managed to get out of the wheelchair and crawl into the backseat without anyone's help, cuddling up with the blanket Carr wrapped around him, and off they lurched into the storm. ...

"[Three long hours into the trip], Carr presumed Hank was in a deep sleep as the two-lane highway twisted away from Bluefield, tires humming, telephone poles zipping past in the glare of the headlights. He happened to look over his shoulder for a glance at the form in the backseat—Hank was stretched out on his back, his hands folded across his chest, nothing unusual—and when he noticed that the blanket had fallen away he reached over with his right hand, still driving with his left, to fumble for the blanket and cover Hank with it. It was then that he inadvertently touched Hank's hand. It was stone cold.

"Terror hung in Carr's throat. This was more than he could handle alone. He needed help. Seeing a sign reading 'Oak Hill 6,' his heart pumping furiously, he floored the Cadillac. At the edge of the tiny town there was a cut-rate gas station. He brought the car to a screeching stop, rushed inside the station, and asked the old man on duty if he would come take a look at the fellow in the backseat. 'Looks like you've got a problem,' the man drawled after he had done so, and directed Carr to the Oak Hill Hospital. There, he parked around back, walked into the hospital, and asked two interns to come out and check on his passenger. They followed him to the car and needed only a glance at Hank's rigid body. 'He's dead, all right,' one of them said. 'But isn't there something you can do to revive him?' said Carr. 'It's too late,' he was told. 'The man's dead.' ...

"[At the autopsy], The doctor almost casually noted that there were needle marks on the arms and that Hank had recently been severely beaten and kicked in the groin. No drugs were found in the blood, just traces of alcohol. A coroner's jury later confirmed that Hank died of 'a severe heart condition and hemorrhage,' and let it go at that."

delanceyplace.com 07/5/11 - raphael

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:23:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - Raphael (his full name Raffaello Sanzio or Santi), 1483 to 1520, painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance. Born in Urbino, in east central Italy, he is considered one of the three artistic giants to emerge from the Renaissance, along with Michelangelo and Da Vinci, both of whom served as his primary teachers. Raphael set himself deliberately to learn from Michelangelo the expressive possibilities of human anatomy, and from Leonardo his lighting techniques and sfumato (strong contrast between light and dark). But Raphael differed from Leonardo and Michelangelo, who were both painters of dark intensity and excitement,, in that he wished to develop a calmer and more extroverted style that would serve as a popular, universally accessible form. His work is admired for its clarity and ease of composition, and for its achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Raphael is best known and loved for his Madonnas, and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican, but much focus has recently been given to the equally great Raphael of the portraits:

"Here, in his portraits, the 'divine' Sanzio is finally human or—if you prefer plays on words—he is divinely human. Here, we are exalted and surprised by the presence of an intellectual and critical grasp, which with an unquiet tension make the painter not just accessible to us, but ascribable to a very modern emotional and dialectical dimension.

"... here is the intangible, manly shadow, diffused with limpid vigor in the face ofAgnolo Doni with veristic detail (unusual in Raphael) of the eyelid wrinkle, that makes the Florentine gentleman's gaze more penetrating and watchful. Here is the proud but sluggish stillness of La Gravida with that admirable hand on top of her belly in a gesture of possession defense and pride; and here in contrast are the vibratile hands of the mysterious unreachable Lady of Urbino (La Muta) ... And here, too, in comparison to the heavy indolence of Cardinal Tommaso Inghirami, who is represented halfway between dramatic emphasis and a pitiless, rather than ironic, caricature, we have the sublime spirituality and ambiguity of theCardinal ... or the abandonment of Julius II on the papal chair with that presage of death—the corruption of the flesh— which gives the face of the old pope a more sorrowful, rather than resigned, fixedness of expression. Then there is La Velata in which the prosperity of the woman depicted is made evident by the combination of shining masses and subtle variations of tone. ..."

delanceyplace.com 7/1/11 - russia colonizes america

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the expeditions of Vitus Bering, after whom the Bering Strait is named, were part of a successful Russian effort to colonize America in the early 1700s. Russia's dominion a vast portion of North America ended over a century later with the U.S. purchase of "Alaska" from Russia under the administration of President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward - a transaction known as "Seward's Folly":

"The expedition of Vitus Bering known as the second Kamchatka expedition was inspired by the progressive reforms of Peter the Great and continued by his widow, Empress Anna Ivanovna.

"The second Kamchatka expedition was one of the most ambitious scientific and exploratory expeditions ever undertaken. Based on Bering's sober proposal to follow up on the inconclusive results of his first voyage in search of America a decade earlier, the second expedition was designed to show Europe the grandeur and sophistication of Russia. By the time Bering saw his final instructions in 1731, they had swollen to such grandiose proportions that he scarcely recognized them. He would be at the head of a virtual army of exploration: a few thousand scientists, secretaries, students, interpreters, artists, surveyors, naval officers, mariners, soldiers and skilled labourers, all of whom had to be brought to the eastern coast of Russia across eight thousand kilometres of roadless forests, swamps and tundra, along with tools, iron, canvas, food, books and sclentific implements.

"Once he arrived in Kamchatka, Bering was supposed to build two ships and sail east to America, charting the North American Pacific coastline as far south as California, in addition to charting the coasts of Kamchatka and the Arctic Ocean and establishing astronomical positions throughout Siberia. Concurrently, he was to build another three ships and survey the Kuril Islands, Japan and other areas of eastern Asia. These were his most reasonable and practical instructions. His orders also called for him to populate Okhotsk with Russian citizens, introduce cattle raising on the Pacific coast, found elementary and nautical schools in the distant outpost, construct a dockyard for deepwater ships, and establish iron mines and ironworks for smelting ore. Not surprisingly, despite Bering's Herculean efforts, these tasks would not be completed for generations.

"On June 5, 1741, Bering's two ships slid out of the makeshift dockyards at Petropavlovsk, lurched into the grey, choppy waters and hoisted sails. ... For almost a month, it was a dreary and uncertain voyage; the voyagers saw nothing but sky and sea until July 16. Then, their first view of America: a mighty, snow-dusted spire shrouded in fog. It towered over a vast range of smaller mountains, snug against the coast as far as the eye could see, with endless forests of green emerging into view through the mist. ...

"After exploring several islands, encountering a variety of native peoples and its passengers realizing the enormous size of the new lands to the cast, Bering's ship was wrecked on an island off the Russian coast. Scurvy took hold during the voyage and killed many of the crew as well as Bering himself. The island where they spent a wretched winter eking out a miserable existence is now known as Bering Island, after the doomed captain."

delanceyplace.com 6/30/11 - the comedy of gilda radner

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - Gilda Radner (1946-1989) the much-loved comedian best remembered as part of the original cast of Saturday Night Live. Radner died of ovarian cancer at the age of 43:

"Radner was born in Detroit, nine months after the end of World War II, to a Russian Jewish family. Her father ran a successful hotel in town and many famous nightclub entertainers performed there. Gilda, already named after a Rita Hayworth heroine, was starstruck at an early age. The first wall she banged into was her father's death when she was a teenager and it hit her hard. 'She was also heavy,' recounted Alan Zweibel, another close friend and SNL writer. 'So, the death of a Dad and being fat that was a little bit of a combo platter there that certainly is a really good recipe to be funny. How else do you survive?'

"Gilda went across the border to follow a boyfriend to Canada, worked briefly on a children's television show and then did improv at Toronto's Second City. She came to New York to perform in the National Lampoon Show where producer Lorne Michaels saw her: she was the first of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players to be hired for Saturday Night Live. Through the first five seasons of the program, Radner became the show's heart, winning the audience over with her gallery of misguided misfits. There seemed to be few risks she was not willing to take, whether it was gluing fake armpit hair on to parody Patti Smith or slamming full throttle into a bedroom door [or jumping on the bed] as the hyperactive little girl Judy Miller:

" 'And now it's time for the Judy Miller Show!!!!!! Yea!!! And now presenting the beautiful star of our show - here she is folks Miss Judy Miller! I am the most beautiful bride in the whole wide world!!!!!'

" 'Part of the charm of Gilda was the child inside of her that she was not afraid to access,' said Zweibel. 'She felt comfortable in the world that's in the head of children.'

"Perhaps her greatest risk-taking revolved around her ability to endow each of her unforgettable characters with a humiliating flaw that would have, in less sensitive hands, consigned them to social marginalization. Her version of Barbara Walters combined a speech impediment with a gargantuan ego: 'I mean wewwy who does deserve to be Fiwst Wady? Me, Baba Wawa, Fiwst Wady of tewevision.' Emily Litella, the 'Weekend Update' contributor incapable of getting the simplest facts straight, was continually railing against 'Violins on Television' or 'Soviet Jewelry.' There was 'always something' over-the-top about newscaster Roseanne Rosannadanna who never seemed to understand the most basic rules of taste or etiquette. ...

"No matter how egregious the faux pas of her characters, no matter how goofy they seemed to be, they always thought they were perfectly fine; that's because Radner did too. Anne Beatts remembered that 'She once said that she thought comedy originated for her when you're little and you fall down on the ice? And people might laugh at you so you try and make it seem like you fell on purpose? That was the root of her comedy.' Nowhere was that more apparent than with Lisa Loopner, the girl nerd, who despite the fact that her breasts were in her words 'miserable maraschino cherries,' still radiated an immense sexual attraction to her pizza-faced classmate Todd, played by Bill Murray [who] was 'a boy and a friend but not my boyfriend' ...

"As Gilda's star ascended there were the inevitable rungs in the ladder of crossover success - movies, a one-woman Broadway show - but she always turned down the repeated fervent requests for her to star in her own sitcom. She was happy where she was on SNL, but in 1980, when the original cast left after five seasons, it was time to move on. Her huge fame at the time filled her more with ambivalence than anything else; she told a television reporter that 'it happens a lot in comedy that when you get success and celebrity it changes. There's something about being an underdog, a voyeur, that makes comedy possible.' "

delanceyplace.com 6/29/11 - population booms and busts

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the United States has recently developed a key strategic advantage versus most other countries in the world: the U.S. population is growing, especially in the key working age groups, while a significant number of other large countries have declining populations and have a comparatively higher percent of their population in the "retired" age range - which will create a higher burden in social security and healthcare costs. Further, as part of its overall growth, the U.S. has seen strong growth in entrepreneurs. Historically, and in contrast to our recent conventional wisdom, sustained improvements in per capita national wealth have always gone hand-in-hand with strong gains in population, while declines in population have almost always been harbingers of significant declines in per capita wealth:

"By 2050, about 100 million more people will inhabit [the United States], bringing the total U.S. population to more than 400 million. With a fertility rate 50 percent higher than Russia, Germany, or Japan, and well above that of China, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, and virtually all of Eastern Europe, the United States has become an outlier among its traditional competitors, all of whose populations are stagnant and seem destined to eventually decline. Thirty years ago, Russia constituted the core of a vast Soviet empire that was considerably more populous than the United States. Today, Russia's low birthrate and high mortality rate suggest that its population will drop by 30 percent by 2050, to less than one third that of the United States. Even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has spoken of 'the serious threat of turning into a decaying nation.'

"Perhaps an even more important demographic gap is emerging between the United States and East Asia. Over the past few decades a rapid expansion of their workforce fueled the rise of the East Asian tigers, the great economic success story of our epoch. Yet within the next four decades, a third or more of their populations will be older than 65, compared with only a fifth in America. By 2050, according to the United Nations, roughly 30 percent of China's population will be more than 60 years old. Lacking a developed social-security system, China's rapid aging will start cutting deep into the country's savings and per capita income rates. A slowdown of population growth in poor countries can offer a short-term economic and environmental benefit. But in advanced countries, a rapidly aging or decreasing population does not bode well for societal or economic health.

"Between 2000 and 2050 the U.S. population aged 15 to 64 - the key working and school-age group - will grow 42 percent, while the same group will decline by 10 percent in China, nearly 25 percent in Europe, and 44 percent in Japan. Unlike its rivals, America's economic imperative will lie not in meeting the needs of the aging, but in providing job and income growth for our expanding workforce. What the United States does with its 'demographic dividend' - that is, its relatively young working-age population - will depend largely on whether the private sector can generate jobs, an issue that's particularly critical now, with more than 15 million unemployed.

"Immigrants may be one force that will lead the way: between 1990 and 2005 immigrants started one quarter of all venture-backed public companies. This enterprising spirit is crucial, because U.S. employment has been shifting not to mega corporations but to individuals; between 1980 and 2000, the number of self-employed people expanded tenfold to make up 16 percent of the workforce. "

delanceyplace.com 6/28/11 - the alamo was about slavery

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:47:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - as David Crockett entered into sparsely-populated Texas from Tennessee in 1836 hoping for riches from new land grants but unwittingly headed for martyrdom at the Alamo, white settlers there were chafing at the Mexican laws that prohibited slavery. While the causes of the Texas War for Independence were many, the principal cause was this prohibition of slavery. And of the "holy trinity" of heroes at the Alamo - William Barrett Travis, James Bowie, and "Davy" Crockett - both Travis and Bowie were land speculators and slave traders:

"Like many others making the same journey at the time, Crockett understood what he faced once he crossed the Red River into Texas and left the United States. He had to have been aware that, in the weeks before he departed, the animosity had increased between the government of Mexico and the American settlers, called Texians, in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, The white colonists were becoming increasingly tired of living under Mexican rule, and they headed for war with hopes of forming their own separate republic. Many of these Anglos were illegal immigrants and did not abide by Mexican law. All citizens were required to join the Catholic Church, accept the language and laws of the governing country, and, by the late 1820s, observe the ban on the enslavement of human beings.

"To the Anglos' way of thinking, slaves were too important to give up, particularly for the wealthier southerners who were accustomed to the plantation system style of farming. 'The discussion of slavery in the West begins in Texas, the heart of the region's slave regime,' writes Quintard Taylor Jr., African American history scholar. 'Slaveholders unapologetically proclaimed both the agricultural need for black labor and their right to own their fellow human beings.'

"Slavery had been a volatile issue in Texas ever since the early 1820s, when Stephen Fuller Austin convinced the Mexican government, which had just won its independence from Spain, that Anglo settlers would provide a buffer on the northern frontier between the settlements to the south and the raiding Comanches. The original three hundred families that Austin led to what was promised as the land of milk and honey soon multiplied. Prospects of free land lured thousands of whites across the Sabine and Red rivers. By 1823 at least 3,000 U.S. citizens had entered Texas illegally, along with 700 legitimate settlers. About the same time, the Austin Colony had established an unofficial capital at San Felipe de Austin, on the west bank of the Brazos River. Two years earlier, Austin was already expressing concern over what he perceived would become a major problem with the Mexican government and the colonists.

" 'The principal difficulty is slavery, this they will not admit - as the law is all slaves are to be free in ten years, but I am trying to have it amended so as to make them slaves for life and their children free at 21 years - but do not think I shall succeed in this point, and that the law will pass as it is now, that the slaves introduced by the settlers shall be free after 10 years,' Austin wrote in a dispatch from Mexico City in 1822. ...

"Noah Smithwick described wealthy landowners who established cotton plantations [in Texas] and imported large numbers of slaves. 'Over on the Brazos ... a planter from South Carolina ... had over 100 slaves, with which force he set to work clearing ground and planting cotton and corn. He hired two men to kill game to feed them on, and the mustangs [wild horses] being the largest and easiest to kill ... the negroes lived on horse meat till corn came in.'

"Slavery was indeed an important issue in the Texas war of rebellion, just as it would be a decade later in the Mexican-American War. Yet because slavery is antithetical to hero worship, often the subject has been noticeably absent in discussions of early Texas settlement by Anglo immigrants. The fact remains that by the late 1820s Mexico had a politically active and strong abolitionist movement. In 1829 a new Mexican constitution prohibited slavery, which so outraged the big landowners and speculators in Texas that a provision was drafted that permitted slavery under certain conditions. That was soon rescinded and a new policy put into place. It allowed all slaves currently residing in Texas to remain but banned the importation of additional slaves. It also decreed that children born to slaves in the territory would be free. At the same time, the Mexican government passed a law blocking any further American immigration into Texas. By 1830 there were more than 20,000 settlers and 2,000 slaves living in Texas, making Anglos more numerous than Mexicans. ...

"The mostly southern-born white settlers of Texas were on a collision course with the Mexican government. 'The two sides could no longer avoid the slavery issue. Mexico now fully supported equality for its entire population, while many of the white immigrants wanted Texas to become an empire for slavery.

"Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna y Perez de Lebron, president of Mexico and commander of the Mexican army, puzzled as to why a province in his republic still allowed slaves, asked: 'Shall we permit those wretches to moan in chains any longer in a country whose kind laws protect the liberty of man without distinction of cast or color?' Santa Anna posed the rhetorical question in early 1836, just as Crockett was making his way to Texas."

delanceyplace.com 6/27/11 - branch rickey has to sell the owner first

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - on a cold January morning in 1943, Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, walks to an early morning meeting in Forest Hills, New York. Before he can make history by recruiting Jackie Robinson to be the first black baseball player in the major leagues, he must first face George V. McLaughlin, the powerful head of the Brooklyn Trust Company and owner of the Dodgers, and get his permission:

"Here on this street corner stands Branch Rickey, a lone white man with a fierce belief that it is the deepest sin against God to hold color against a person. On this day he means to change baseball and America, too. The National Pastime, the game that teaches sportsmanship to children, must shake with shame, Rickey thought. Until this morning in Forest Hills, there has been no white person willing to take on the issue. That is fine with Rickey. He feels that he is at bat with two outs and a 3-2 pitch coming. He is the last man up, sure he will get a hit.

"At 7:00 a.m. on this same morning, George V. McLaughlin leaves his duplex at 35 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn. The great park lawns across the street brittle with frost. He still hasn't the slightest idea of what beyond team finances Branch Rickey wants to discuss. ... As the head of the financially creaky Dodgers baseball team, McLaughlin walked through a world of smiles, claps on the back, and congratulations. If you were prominent enough, you could get players' autographs from George V. and become a towering figure with your kids. In his Brooklyn, only rosary beads blessed by the Pope could mean more....

"McLaughlin was not famous for working with or socializing with blacks. ... At some point in the business talk, Rickey mentioned to McLaughlin that he wanted to make a large expenditure for scouts. These men would find good players who were too young to be drafted into the war now but would serve someday soon, and then, God willing, come home strong and swift and eager to play. Some of the prospects now were as young as fifteen and sixteen; there was this boy in Compton, California, everybody called him Duke, last name Snider. Rickey's plan would bring all that young talent to play alongside returning Brooklyn veterans. McLaughlin was in favor.

" 'By the way, all these scouts would cost a lot of money,' Rickey said.

"McLaughlin still loved the idea. 'We'll get a march on all of them.'

"Rickey now made a careful choice of his words and tone. Be passionate. No, entirely inappropriate. Be nonchalant. Not that, either. Why not just try the truth? This is no coward we have here. This is a secure man. So he told McLaughlin that by looking for all this new talent, the scouts might come across 'a Negro player or two.'

"McLaughlin showed nothing. Of course he knew exactly what this meant. Rickey was not just throwing out a casual idea. The man would bring a stranger under the roof, a black who should be mowing lawns and instead would be running bases in this white national sport.

"Then George V. started to count.

"His friend Bill Shea remembered: 'He figured that at the least there were a million blacks who played baseball. He knew right there in that room that it was only sensible to look for players who could make the Dodgers. And fill seats at Ebbets Field and all over the league. The players who could do it were out there.'

"McLaughlin had an old style of reasoning that came from years in police stations and bank negotiations. 'If you want to do this to get a beat on the other teams and make some money, then let's do it,' he told Rickey. 'But if you want to do this for some social change, forget it. We want to win and make money. Don't try to bring principle into this. If this doesn't work for money, you're sunk.'

"Rickey tingled inside. He had found a man whose seemingly flat indifference to the enormity of the subject, reducing it from a religious calling to a way of making more money, gave hope. What these two men had just done was agree to put their hands into the troubled history of America and fix it, starting in a baseball dugout."In today's excerpt - on a cold January morning in 1943, Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, walks to an early morning meeting in Forest Hills, New York. Before he can make history by recruiting Jackie Robinson to be the first black baseball player in the major leagues, he must first face George V. McLaughlin, the powerful head of the Brooklyn Trust Company and owner of the Dodgers, and get his permission:

"Here on this street corner stands Branch Rickey, a lone white man with a fierce belief that it is the deepest sin against God to hold color against a person. On this day he means to change baseball and America, too. The National Pastime, the game that teaches sportsmanship to children, must shake with shame, Rickey thought. Until this morning in Forest Hills, there has been no white person willing to take on the issue. That is fine with Rickey. He feels that he is at bat with two outs and a 3-2 pitch coming. He is the last man up, sure he will get a hit.

"At 7:00 a.m. on this same morning, George V. McLaughlin leaves his duplex at 35 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn. The great park lawns across the street brittle with frost. He still hasn't the slightest idea of what beyond team finances Branch Rickey wants to discuss. ... As the head of the financially creaky Dodgers baseball team, McLaughlin walked through a world of smiles, claps on the back, and congratulations. If you were prominent enough, you could get players' autographs from George V. and become a towering figure with your kids. In his Brooklyn, only rosary beads blessed by the Pope could mean more....

"McLaughlin was not famous for working with or socializing with blacks. ... At some point in the business talk, Rickey mentioned to McLaughlin that he wanted to make a large expenditure for scouts. These men would find good players who were too young to be drafted into the war now but would serve someday soon, and then, God willing, come home strong and swift and eager to play. Some of the prospects now were as young as fifteen and sixteen; there was this boy in Compton, California, everybody called him Duke, last name Snider. Rickey's plan would bring all that young talent to play alongside returning Brooklyn veterans. McLaughlin was in favor.

" 'By the way, all these scouts would cost a lot of money,' Rickey said.

"McLaughlin still loved the idea. 'We'll get a march on all of them.'

"Rickey now made a careful choice of his words and tone. Be passionate. No, entirely inappropriate. Be nonchalant. Not that, either. Why not just try the truth? This is no coward we have here. This is a secure man. So he told McLaughlin that by looking for all this new talent, the scouts might come across 'a Negro player or two.'

"McLaughlin showed nothing. Of course he knew exactly what this meant. Rickey was not just throwing out a casual idea. The man would bring a stranger under the roof, a black who should be mowing lawns and instead would be running bases in this white national sport.

"Then George V. started to count.

"His friend Bill Shea remembered: 'He figured that at the least there were a million blacks who played baseball. He knew right there in that room that it was only sensible to look for players who could make the Dodgers. And fill seats at Ebbets Field and all over the league. The players who could do it were out there.'

"McLaughlin had an old style of reasoning that came from years in police stations and bank negotiations. 'If you want to do this to get a beat on the other teams and make some money, then let's do it,' he told Rickey. 'But if you want to do this for some social change, forget it. We want to win and make money. Don't try to bring principle into this. If this doesn't work for money, you're sunk.'

"Rickey tingled inside. He had found a man whose seemingly flat indifference to the enormity of the subject, reducing it from a religious calling to a way of making more money, gave hope. What these two men had just done was agree to put their hands into the troubled history of America and fix it, starting in a baseball dugout."

delanceyplace.com 6/24/11 - earthquakes in the center of america

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1811-1812, a series of earthquakes known as the New Madrid Earthquakes rocked the Mississippi Valley, reaching a level some estimate as 7.5 to 8.0 on the Richter Scale. These earthquakes remain the most powerful earthquakes ever to hit the eastern United States. There are estimates that the earthquakes were felt strongly over roughly 130,000 square kilometers (50,000 square miles), and moderately across nearly 3 million square kilometers (1 million square miles). The historic 1906 San Francisco earthquake, by comparison, was felt moderately over roughly 16,000 square kilometers (6,000 square miles). Though some feel the chances of recurrence are slight, the zone remains active today. In a report filed in November 2008, The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that a serious earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone could result in "the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States," further predicting "widespread and catastrophic" damage across Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and particularly Tennessee:

"Between December 16, 1811, and late April 1812, a series of devastating earthquakes shook the Mississippi Valley and beyond when more than two thousand tremors, some of Old Testament proportions, rocked the land. Eventually the quakes were called the New Madrid Earthquakes because tiny New Madrid, in the boot-heel region of what was to be named Missouri, was the village closest to the epicenter. It was estimated that the tremors affected more than a million and a half square miles, making whole towns disappear, swallowing up untold numbers of people, and even causing the Mississippi to reverse course and flow backward for several hours. Between the shocks, people heard the moans of the dying, the bleating of animals, and the screeching of birds. The air was clogged with a thick vapor that smelled like sulfur. Dazed survivors of the initial tremors believed the end of the earth had come and the gates of hell were opening.

"The earthquakes were so powerful that they were felt by people in all directions - in New York, New Orleans, Canada, and on the western fringes of the Missouri River. President James Madison claimed that he was tossed from his bed in Washington by the initial shock. It was said that the catastrophic quakes stopped clocks in Boston and set bells ringing in Virginia."

"The earthquakes created a remarkable lake, twenty-five miles long and from one-half to eight miles in width on the Tennessee side of the Mississippi River. Later named Reelfoot Lake, this body of water sat untouched for many years after Chickasaw Indians and the few white settlers living there vanished due to the many quakes. During that time the area became a paradise for hunters and fishermen; it would later become known as 'the land of the shakes.'"

delanceyplace.com 6/23/11 - the monster factory

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - veteran prison counselor Sunny Schwartz embarks on the task of bringing a highly innovative program called 'restorative justice' to the San Francisco County Prison system. Like most prisons, these prisons - which house prisoners with records fairly typical of jails throughout the country - are commonly referred to by guards and others associated with them as 'monster factories'. The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate:

"I had to make good on the promise of [introducing] constructive programs, and my first big push went to getting a school in the jail. I discovered that our neighbor to the north, just behind the razor-wire fence and a stand of trees, was Skyline Community College. I gave them the hard sell, told them our population needed their classes more than anyone else, and they'd said they would try. One of the first things the college did was help us perform a survey of our population's needs so I would know what kind of programs I should start:

"75 percent [of the prisoners] were reading somewhere between the fourth- and sixth-grade levels. 90 percent never had a legal job. 90 percent were self-identified addicts. 80 percent were self-identified victims of sexual or physical violence as a child. 65 percent had been placed in a special-education class at some point. 75 percent were high school dropouts.

"It was dismal. If there was ever a set of numbers that spoke more plainly to the need for some alternative to warehousing people, I hadn't seen it. Even I was surprised that 80 percent said they had been abused in the past, and I was stunned that 90 percent had never had a legal job. These were incredible obstacles. ...

"[I learned of a program called] 'Restorative Justice.' The name alone piqued my interest. Nothing I'd seen in the criminal justice system had ever been in the business of 'restoring' anything. I'd seen crimes committed, I'd seen people punished, lives and families ruined, but never restoration. ... The three principles of restorative justice are offender accountability, victim restoration and community involvement to heal the harm caused by crime. ... The goal of restorative justice was to heal the victims, for perpetrators to take responsibility for their actions and make meaningful restitution, and for governments and communities to be part of the process. ...

"Most people I think believe that prison or jail should be a horrible experience. People don't think of it as a deterrent so much as just deserts. 'They' hurt 'us' therefore 'we' should hurt 'them.' For years politicians have won elections by promising to take away cable television and weight rooms and anything seen to make prison cushy. We have a culture where jokes about prison rape are made out in the open. The prevailing wisdom is that prisoners deserve to be treated like animals; they should fear prison and suffer while they are there. Anyone who has spent time working with prisoners knows this has largely come to pass. What most people don't realize is the consequences of making prisons a living nightmare. Most of the inmates I'd worked with, particularly when I was a law intern, felt punished, but not many of them took responsibility for their crimes or felt any remorse.

"Martin Aguerro, the pedophile, the first client I had when I started in 1980, was a case in point. He complained about the squalid treatment and living conditions in jail, he felt wronged, but I never got the sense that he thought about his crimes. In fact, everything about the system of prosecution and defense is set up so that criminals get into a habit of denying their responsibility. Every step of the way between the arrest and the trial, people accused of crimes deny everything or keep silent. It's what their defense attorneys tell them to do. After their trial, if they're convicted, many don't change their mind-set. Why should they? To truly confront what they've done requires confronting the shame and fear and the reality of their situation. Few people choose to do this because it's difficult. After all it's hard for noncriminals to take responsibility for doing the wrong thing, much less someone sitting in a prison cell. So criminals blame someone or something else - the cop who caught them or their lousy upbringing - for their circumstances and spend their time growing angrier and angrier about being treated like an animal. They are usually full of rage when they are released and less prepared to function as citizens; the predictable products of the monster factory."

delanceyplace.com 6/22/11 - soldiers are reluctant to kill

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - most soldiers are reluctant to fire their weapons when confronted by the enemy:

"During World War II, U.S. Army Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall asked the average soldiers what it was that they did in battle. His singularly unexpected discovery was that, of every hundred men along the line of fire during the period of an encounter, an average of only 15 to 20 'would take any part with their weapons.' This was consistently true 'whether the action was spread over a day, or two days or three.'

"Marshall [and his team] based their findings on individual and mass interviews with thousands of soldiers in more than four hundred infantry companies, in Europe and in the Pacific, immediately after they had been in close combat with German or Japanese troops. The results were consistently the same: only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. ... The question is why. ... [The answer] is the simple and demonstrable fact that there is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it....

"There is ample supporting evidence to indicate that Marshall's observations are applicable not only to U.S. soldiers or even to the soldiers on all sides in World War II. Indeed, there are compelling data that indicate that this singular lack of enthusiasm for killing one's fellow man has existed throughout military history. ...

Paddy Griffith estimates that the average musket fire from a Napoleonic or Civil War regiment (usually numbering between two hundred and one thousand men) firing at an exposed enemy regiment at an average range of thirty yards, would usually result in hitting only one or two men per minute! Such firefights 'dragged on until exhaustion set in or nightfall put an end to hostilities. Casualties mounted because the contest went on so long, not because the fire was particularly deadly.'

"Thus we see that the fire of the Napoleonic-and Civil War-era soldier was incredibly ineffective. This does not represent a failure on the part of the weaponry. John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book Soldiers tell us of a Prussian experiment in the late 1700s in which an infantry battalion fired smoothbore muskets at a target one hundred feet long by six feet high, representing an enemy unit, which resulted in 25 percent hits at 225 yards, 40 percent hits at 150 yards, and 60 percent hits at 75 yards. This represented the potential killing power of such a unit. The reality is demonstrated at the Battle of Belgrade in 1717, when 'two Imperial battalions held their fire until their Turkish opponents were only thirty paces away, but hit only thirty-two Turks when they fired and were promptly overwhelmed.'

"Sometimes the fire was completely harmless, as Benjamin McIntyre observed in his firsthand account of a totally bloodless nighttime firefight at Vicksburg in 1863. 'It seems strange ...,' wrote McIntyre, that a company of men can fire volley after volley at a like number of men over a distance of fifteen steps and not cause a single casualty. Yet such was the facts in this instance. The musketry of the black-powder era was not always so ineffective, but over and over again the average comes out to only one or two men hit per minute with musketry.

"Muzzle-loading muskets could fire from one to five shots per minute, depending on the skill of the operator and the state of the weapon. With a potential hit rate of well over 50 percent at the average combat ranges of this era, the killing rate should have been hundreds per minute, instead of one or two. The weak link between the killing potential and the killing capability of these units was the soldier. The simple fact is that when faced with a living, breathing opponent instead of a target, a significant majority of the soldiers revert to a posturing mode in which they fire over their enemy's heads."

delanceyplace.com 6/21/11 - too early to say

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the Chinese have often been invoked as having a longer-term perspective on history compared to the West, and to buttress this view, the story is often repeated of Premier Zhou Enlai's response when asked to discuss the impact of the French Revolution. His answer? "Too early to say":

"The impact of the French Revolution? 'Too early to say.'

"Thus did Zhou Enlai - in responding to questions in the early 1970s about the popular revolt in France almost two centuries earlier - buttress China's reputation as a far-thinking, patient civilisation.

"The former premier's answer has become a frequently deployed cliché, used as evidence of the sage Chinese ability to think long-term - in contrast to impatient westerners.

"The trouble is that Zhou was not referring to the 1789 storming of the Bastille in a discussion with Richard Nixon during the late US president's pioneering China visit. Zhou's answer related to events only three years earlier - the 1968 students' riots in Paris, according to Nixon's interpreter at the time.

"At a seminar in Washington to mark the publication of Henry Kissinger's book, On China, Chas Freeman, a retired foreign service officer, sought to correct the long-standing error. 'I distinctly remember the exchange. There was a misunderstanding that was too delicious to invite correction,' said Mr. Freeman.

"He said Zhou had been confused when asked about the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. 'But these were exactly the kinds of terms used by the students to describe what they were up to in 1968 and that is how Zhou understood them.'

"Geremie Barme, of the Australian National University, said Zhou's quote fitted with the widespread western view of an 'oriental obliquity' that thought far into the future and was 'somehow profound'. 'Whereas, in China, you mostly hear that the leadership is short-sighted, radically pragmatic and anything but subtle,' he said. Dr. Barme added that Chinese researchers with access to the foreign ministry archives in Beijing said that the records made clear that Zhou was referring to the 1968 riots in Paris.

"The Chinese archives also record Zhou's conversation as being with Henry Kissinger. A spokeswoman for Dr. Kissinger said that 'he has no precise recollection but that the Freeman version seems much more plausible'.

"Zhou's cryptic caution also reflected the murderous political climate in Beijing at the time, and the premier would not have risked passing judgment on the radical French Maoists involved in the Paris riots.

"It is not the first time a misinterpretation of a Chinese leader's saying has mistakenly entered mainstream parlance. Deng Xiaoping, who launched the country's market reforms, is credited with saying, 'To get rich is glorious', although there is no record that he said it. The oft-quoted Chinese curse, 'May you live in interesting times', does not exist in China itself, scholars say."

delanceyplace.com 6/20/11 - fake authenticity

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:06:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the 1980s, "conspicuous consumption" reached the middle class, as middle class consumers began to leave behind the practical but seemingly dated habits of their parents - embodied by Sears and McDonalds - and traded them for consumption that they believed would display their uniqueness and authenticity - buying Evian water and Starbucks coffee. But it was a mass-produced uniqueness and a fake authenticity:

"For much of the postwar era, the broad, somewhat undifferentiated American middle class found itself sandwiched between the rich on top and the working-class below them, with the poor even further below them. Most of these accountants and account executives, furniture store-owners and doctors shared a common commitment to modesty and thrift. The rich might show off and spend wildly, but the middle class demonstrated its sensible frugality by buying convenient and useful items. That didn't mean that they didn't occasionally splurge on a chrome-trimmed car or a cashmere sweater with a mink collar or chicken cordon bleu at a French restaurant. But these weren't everyday things.

"Perhaps no company embodied the consumer ideals of the staid organization men and steady housewives more than Sears. The Chicago retail giant offered reliable products at reasonable prices. Good stuff and good value attracted the cautious middle class who cared more about how long things lasted or how convenient they were than how they looked. In many middling social circles, the ability to sniff out a deal translated into social standing and respect. But the same deals that brought the middle classes to Sears, and then to McDonald's, and later to Wal-Mart, also attracted working people and the poor. Laborers and the even less well-off went to these places because they had to; saving a few dollars on cereal, batteries, and paper towels left more money for clothes, carpeting, and cars. Yet at the upper edges of the middle class, people with no financial worries didn't want to look, act, or consume like the poor or the ordinary.

"Looking for ways to distinguish themselves - to broadcast their wealth, know-how, and sophistication, all key markers of status as the twentieth century drew to a close - the upper reaches of the middle class developed new consumption patterns in the 1980s, as Starbucks started to take off. Mostly they looked for luxuries, indulgences big and small, that the poor, the working classes, the middle of the middle, and the least refined of the rich could not afford or appreciate. ... Products from Prada, Gucci, Lexus, and Evian became a 'virtual fifth food group,' as the United States, one commentator announced, became 'one nation under luxury.' ...

"Increasingly over the last two decades, women and men with higher salaries and more college classes under their belt broke away from the sensible middle class and engaged in a new round of conspicuous consumption. ... Yet they also wanted to show off their education and know-how. That is where the authenticity part mattered and where it became, under Starbucks and Whole Foods and so many other natural-looking chains, more about status and sophistication than it was about the counterculturally tinged consumption and rebellion against the fake that Jerry Baldwin and his fellow travelers favored. Post-post-hippies, like [Starbucks CEO] Howard Schultz, associated authenticity not so much with the search for more genuine products, wrote consumer behavior specialist Michael Solomon in 2003, as with a range of upscale values, 'like a better lifestyle, personal control, and better taste.'

"To display smarts, superior tastes, and even enlightened politics, the upper classes of the 1990s focused their buying on things that looked natural and rare but also required special knowledge to fully understand. They bought a California wine to demonstrate that they knew about exceptional vintages, or a Viking stove because they knew that real cooks used these oversized machines, or a bike trip through Provence because they knew from their college art history classes that the hills and sun there inspired pained and brilliant painters. ... Buying in post-Reagan America was not about keeping up with the Joneses; it was about separating yourself from the Joneses, the conformists in the middle."

delanceyplace.com 6/17/11 - slicing a person's ears off

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - even in the sparsely populated and violent world of the American frontier, the settlers acted to have some semblance of law and justice. In 1810, 24 year old David Crockett, newly married and about to move away from his wife's parents to find better hunting grounds, was exposed to harsh incidences of this justice:

"Before Crockett could move, a crisis erupted on Polly's [his wife's] side of the family that required urgent attention. One of Polly's five brothers, John Finley, who had wed Nancy Barnes, a local girl, on June 18, 1811, found himself at the center of an embarrassing legal action that threatened his reputation, livelihood, and perhaps even his life. His dilemma stemmed from gossip circulating the settlements and crossroads of Jefferson County that, in October of 1810, Finley had sexual intercourse with a mare, owned by William Bradshaw."

"Such a 'crime against nature' was considered to be as detestable as any offense, and in many places if judged guilty the resulting punishment could mean execution. Respect for law and order demanded harsh consequences. As early as 1792, the first criminal indictment was recorded in Jefferson County, when a man named Reuben Roach was found guilty of stealing three yards of linen and three yards of royal ribbon. He received ten lashes on his bare back at the public whipping post. A few years later, Jesse Jeffrey was convicted of horse theft, a crime that often ended on a gallows. Instead, the sentence handed down ruled that the man 'should stand in the pillory one hour, receive thirty-nine lashes upon his bareback well laid on, have his ears nailed to the pillory and cut off, and that he should be branded upon one cheek with the letter H and on the other with the letter T, in a plain and visible manner.' Some citizens thought that hanging would have been a more humane punishment. If stealing a horse could get a person strung up, or whipped and mutilated, the Finley family shuddered to think what the punishment would be for 'buggery of a horse.' ...

"John Finley [countersued] in 1811 by filing a case of slander against Finley's three accusers - David Givens, Richard Grace, and William Bradshaw, owner of the horse allegedly made 'victim' by Finley. Legal proceedings continued for quite sometime as both sides made their case before judge James Trimble. ... The sordid Finley proceedings finally concluded with Judge Trimble finding for [Finley]. John Finley never received what he considered his just due after the trial. He died in 1814, and it was not until the following year that two hundred bushels of corn were paid as retribution to his heirs, William and James Finley....

"[In another instance, a neighbor named] Russell Bean had delivered a cargo of his handcrafted guns to buyers in New Orleans, where he then remained for two years, engaging in cock fighting, horse racing, foot races, and other pleasures. When he got back to Jonesboro [Tennessee] and walked into his cabin, Bean was shocked to find his wife, Rosamond, nursing an infant. Outraged at this blatant act of infidelity, the swaggering Bean swigged down some fresh whiskey and decided to mark the baby so he could then distinguish it from the eight children that he had fathered. Bean yanked out his hunting knife and sliced off the baby's ears. For such a horrific deed, Bean was fined, imprisoned, and branded on the palm of his hand, as was the custom. To show his distain for such treatment, Bean bit out the brand from his hand and spit the flesh on the floor.

"Though divorce was an infrequent occurrence in those days, the stricken Rosamond soon divorced Bean."

delanceyplace.com 6/16/11 - the story of rip van winkle

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:37:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Rip Van Winkle, who was author Washington Irving's vehicle for conveying the lightning pace of change in early post-Revolutionary America. During this period, Americans became the first people to expect and to prize change, and business and profit became more honored than in any other country in the Western world:

"During the second decade of the nineteenth century, writer Washington Irving developed an acute sense that his native land was no longer the same place it had been just a generation earlier. Irving had conservative and nostalgic sensibilities, and he sought to express some of his amazement at the transformation that had taken place in America by writing his story 'Rip Van Winkle.' Irving had his character Rip awaken from a sleep that had begun before the Revolution and had lasted twenty years. When Rip entered his old village, he immediately felt lost. The buildings, the faces, the names were all strange and incomprehensible. 'The very village was altered - it was larger and more populous,' and idleness, except among the aged, was no longer tolerated. 'The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility' - a terrifying situation for Rip, who had had 'an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour.' Even the language was strange - 'rights of citizens - elections - members of Congress - liberty and other words which were a perfect babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle.' When people asked him 'on which side he voted' and 'whether he was Federal or a Democrat,' Rip could only stare 'in vacant stupidity.'

" 'Rip Van Winkle' became the most popular of Irving's many stories, for early nineteenth-century Americans could appreciate Rip's bewilderment. Although superficially the political leadership seemed much the same - on the sign at the village inn the face of George Washington had simply replaced that of George III - beneath the surface Rip, like most Americans, knew that 'everything's changed.' In a few short decades Americans had experienced a remarkable transformation in their society and culture, and, like Rip and his creator, many wondered what had happened and who they really were.

"Before the Revolution of 1776, America had been merely a collection of disparate British colonies composed of some two million subjects huddled along a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast - European outposts whose cultural focus was still London, the metropolitan center of the empire. Following the War of 1812 with Great Britain - often called the Second American Revolution - these insignificant provinces had become a single giant continental republic with nearly ten million citizens, many of whom had already spilled into the lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The cultural focus of this huge expansive nation was no longer abroad but was instead directed inward at its own boundless possibilities.

"By 1815 Americans had experienced a transformation in the way they related to one another and in the way they perceived themselves and the world around them. And this transformation took place before industrialization, before urbanization, before railroads, and before any of the technological breakthroughs usually associated with modern social change. In the decades following the Revolution America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change but came to expect it and prize it.

"The population grew dramatically, doubling every twenty years or so, as it had for several generations, more than twice the rate of growth of any European country. And people were on the move as never before. Americans spread themselves over half a continent at astonishing speeds. Between 1790 and 1820 New York's population quadrupled; Kentucky's multiplied nearly eight times. In a single decade Ohio grew from a virtual wilderness (except, of course, for the presence of the native Indians, whom white Americans scarcely acknowledged) to become more populous than most of the century-old colonies had been at the time of the Revolution. In a single generation Americans occupied more territory than they had occupied during the entire 150 years of the colonial period, and in the process killed or displaced tens of thousands of Indians.

"Although most Americans in 1815 remained farmers living in rural areas, they had become, especially in the North, one of the most highly commercialized people in the world. They were busy buying and selling not only with the rest of the world but increasingly with one another, everyone, it seemed, trying to realize what Niles' Weekly Register declared 'the almost universal ambition to get forward.' Nowhere in the Western world was business and working for profit more praised and honored."

delanceyplace.com 6/15/11 - the dangerous nobel prize in economics has been sent

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:11:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - academic orthodoxy can be a dangerous thing. In fact, any kind of orthodoxy can too easily segue into herd mentality. And in economics, academic orthodoxy coupled with advanced quantitative techniques can easily become uncoupled from sound reasoning and common sense. And so Robert Merton and Myron Scholes - who defined asset valuation orthodoxy with such work as the Black-Scholes financial option pricing model - were behind the spectacular multi-billion-dollar collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 after winning the Nobel Prize in economics in 1997:

"In 1997, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for their 'new method to determine the value of derivatives'. Incidentally, the prize is not a real Nobel prize but a prize given by the Swedish central bank 'in memory of Alfred Nobel'. As a matter of fact, several years ago the Nobel family even threatened to deny the prize the use of their ancestor's name, as it had been mostly given to free-market economists of whom Alfred Nobel would not have approved, but that is another story.

"In 1998, a huge hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was on the verge of bankruptcy, following the Russian financial crisis. The fund was so large that its bankruptcy was expected to bring everyone else down with it. The US financial system avoided a collapse only because the Federal Reserve Board, the US central bank, twisted the arms of the dozen or so creditor banks to inject money into the company and become reluctant shareholders, gaining control over 90 per cent of the shares. LTCM was eventually folded in 2000.

"LTCM, founded in 1994 by the famous (now infamous) financier John Merriwether, had on its board of directors - would you believe it? - Merton and Scholes. Merton and Scholes were not just lending their names to the company for a fat cheque: they were working partners and the company was actively using their asset-pricing model.

"Undeterred by the LTCM debacle, Scholes went on to set up another hedge fund in 1999, Platinum Grove Asset Management (PGAM). The new backers, one can only surmise, thought that the Merton-Scholes model must have failed back in 1998 due to a totally unpredictable sui generis event - the Russian crisis. After all, wasn't it still the best asset-pricing model available in the history of humanity, approved by the Nobel committee?

"The investors in PGAM were, unfortunately, proven wrong. In November 2008, it practically went bust, temporarily freezing investor withdrawal. The only comfort they could take was probably that they were not alone in being failed by a Nobel laureate. The Trinsum Group, for which Scholes's former partner, Merton, was the chief science officer, also went bankrupt in January 2009.

"There is a saying in Korea that even a monkey can fall from a tree. Yes, we all make mistakes, and one failure - even if it is a gigantic one like LTCM - we can accept as a mistake. But the same mistake twice? Then you know that the first mistake was not really a mistake. Merton and Scholes did not know what they were doing.

"When Nobel Prize-winners in economics, especially those who got the prize for their work on asset pricing, cannot read the financial market, how can we run the world according to an economic principle that assumes people always know what they are doing and therefore should be left alone? As Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Peserve Board, had to admit in a Congressional hearing, it was a 'mistake' to 'presume that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms'. Self-interest will protect people only when they know what is going on and how to deal with it.

"There are many stories coming out of the 2008 financial crisis that show how the supposedly smartest people did not truly understand what they were doing."

delanceyplace.com 6/14/11 - islam and the camel

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 09:47:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - founded by the prophet Muhammad in the sixth century C.E., Islam spread faster than Christianity and its kingdom grew larger than the Roman Empire. By one estimate, the Islamic caliphate's revenue in 820 C.E. was no less than five times greater than that of the Christian Byzantine Empire. This fortune was built on trade and the marketplace, and that trade was built on the backs of camels:

"At the height of Islamic glory, three disparate, rival regional Islamic power centers arose - Spain-Maghrib, Egypt-Levant, and Mesopotamia-Persia - reflecting and magnifying the religious and tribal divisions within Islam. In such decentralized circumstances, economic organization by command was impossible. instead, it was the invisible hand of market forces that governed the signature transit and trade that held together Islam's economy and helped stimulate the breakthroughs underpinning its civilization's rise. 'Not being well endowed by nature,' observes historian Fernand Braudel, 'Islam would have counted for little without the roads across its desert: they held it together and gave it life. Trade-routes were its wealth, its raison d'etre, its civilization. For centuries, they gave it a dominant position."

"Water scarcity presented the primary obstacle standing between Islam and its historic rise to greatness through trade. First and foremost, it needed a way to cross the long expanse of its own hot, waterless interior deserts. Its first triumphant innovation, which at a stroke transformed the barren desert barrier into an insulated, exclusive Islamic trade highway, came by its disciplined organization of the hardy camel, with its prodigious water-storing capacity, into long trade caravans and military supply transports. A caravan of 5,000 to 6,000 camels could carry as much cargo as a very large European merchant sailing ship or a fleet of barges on China's Grand Canal. Islam's quasi-monopoly over this powerful pack animal provided it with the mobility to cross and exit its desert homelands - and to make its mark on world history.

"The one-humped Saharan dromedary was specially adapted for the hot deserts. It could go without drinking water for a week or more, while plodding some 35 miles per day across the desert sands with a 200-pound load on its back, Water was stored in its bloodstream - its fatty hump, which grew flaccid during long journeys without nourishment, functioned as a food reserve - and it maximized water retention by recapturing some exhaled water through its nose. Once at a water source the camel speedily rehydrated by consuming up to 25 gallons in only ten minutes. It even could tolerate briney water. It possessed an uncanny memory for the location of water holes. Moreover, it could eat the thorny plants and dry grasses that grew on and lands and were indigestible by most other animals. During a trip, camels could lose one-quarter their body weight, twice the amount fatal to most other mammals. The camel's extraordinary physical attributes made it possible for caravans to make the two-month, trans-Sahara trip from Morocco to Walata at the frontiers of the Mali Empire in Africa, which included one notorious stage of ten waterless days. ... Camels took Arab merchants and soldiers everywhere."

delanceyplace.com 6/13/11 - paul revere's was not the only heroic ride

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - with all deference to a former governor from Alaska, not only was the purpose of Paul Revere's ride to warn the revolutionaries of an impending British attack, there was another heroic ride of warning twice as long as Revere's. The rider was sixteen year old Sybil Ludington:

"As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Virginius Dabney wrote, 'If you mean to be a historical figure, it is a good idea to get in touch with a leading literary figure - a Longfellow, a Homer, or a Virgil.' As Dabney points out, Paul Revere, Odysseus, and Aeneas 'all took this precaution.'

"Dabney was right. As schoolchildren, we all learned of Paul Revere's ride through Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem 'Paul Revere's Ride,' first published in 1861 [to rally the loyalty of citizens in the American Civil War]. What we didn't learn was that Revere was not the only Patriot to embark upon a midnight ride to raise the alarm of an imminent British attack. What our history books didn't tell us was that there was [another ride] more arduous and more dangerous than Revere's gallop. ...

"[This ride] took place in the Long Island Sound region, an area where, from the outbreak of the war, towns in both Connecticut and New York lived in constant fear of an attack by British troops. However, it was not until April 1777 that the long dreaded attack took place. The site was Danbury, Connecticut, a town that had become vital to the patriot cause because of its use as a primary supply depot by the Continental Army. ...

"[After burning Danbury, the British were poised to ransack the vital region, and America's] militiamen were scattered on their separate farms in what may well have been more than a one-hundred-square-mile area. Who was available to ride out and tell them that they had to return immediately? Certainly not the rider who had brought the news from Danbury. He was too tired to go any farther. Besides, he had no idea where the various militiamen lived or how best to get there. The American commander in the region, Colonel Henry Ludington, could not go. He needed to begin making preparations for the march and had to be there as the members of his regiment returned.

"Ludington realized, however, that there was one person who had perhaps the best chance of carrying out the vital mission. It was Sybil, the oldest of his twelve children - but still only just turned sixteen. But she was a marvel on horseback and knew the region extremely well. And she had taken on great responsibility by helping her mother care for her eleven brothers and sisters. ...

"Within minutes she was ready to go, fully aware of the difficulties, even the dangers, that lay ahead. It was a stormy night, and the heavy spring rain gave no indication of letting up. The narrow roads upon which she was about to ride were not really roads at all, but mere dirt tracks. They would be totally muddy, and washouts would be a constant danger. And even before her father reminded her, she was all too aware of the danger of being overtaken and captured by British 'cowboys' or 'skinners' who might well be operating along the route she was about to take.

"[The militia rallied and] discouraged the British from any further attacks in the area. As a result, the Americans in the vital region gained precious time to organize and resist, in large part due to the efforts of sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington, who was officially commended by General George Washington for her heroic ride. In 1961, American sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington created a dramatic statue of Sybil riding her horse Star and spreading the alarm. Versions of the statue were erected in Danbury, along Sybil's route near Carmel, and at the Daughters of the American Revolution headquarters in Washington, D.C. In perhaps the ultimate tribute, the name of her hometown was to be changed from Fredericksburg to Ludingtonville. Paul Revere traveled about twenty miles during his historic ride. Sybil Ludington made a forty mile journey for the Patriot cause, and she did it over much more difficult terrain than did the Boston artisan and messenger.

"And, unlike Revere, Sybil Ludington completed her mission without being captured. Yet she remains largely unknown. As Virginius Dabney wrote, 'Henry Wardsworth Longfellow, God rest his bones, put Revere on the map. Unfortunately for Sybil, no one with the talent or reputation of a Longfellow did that for her.' "

delanceyplace.com 6/10/11 - triumph of the city

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 2007, the urban population of the world surpassed the rural population for the first time, due to both the increased mechanization of agriculture and the economic and social lure of the city. It had happened in the U.S. in the late 1910's. Now, two hundred forty-three million Americans crowd together in the 3 percent of the country that is urban, and the other 97 percent of the land in the country houses the remaining sixty million. And China's urban population is expected to surpass its rural population in 2015. The city has triumphed:

"Two hundred forty-three million Americans crowd together in the 3 percent of the country that is urban. Thirty-six million people live in and around Tokyo, the most productive metropolitan area in the world. Twelve million people reside in central Mumbai, and Shanghai is almost as large. On a planet with vast amounts of space (all of humanity could fit in Texas - each of us with a personal townhouse), we choose cities. Although it has become cheaper to travel long distances, or to telecommute from the Ozarks to Azerbaijan, more and more people are clustering closer and closer together in large metropolitan areas. Five million more people every month live in the cities of the developing world, and in 2011, more than half the world's population is urban.

"Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution. The great prosperity of contemporary London and Bangalore and Tokyo comes from their ability to produce new thinking. Wandering these cities - whether down cobblestone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways - is to study nothing less than human progress.

"In the richer countries of the West, cities have survived the tumultuous end of the industrial age and are now wealthier, healthier, and more alluring than ever. In the world's poorer places, cities are expanding enormously because urban density provides the clearest path from poverty to prosperity. Despite the technological breakthroughs that have caused the death of distance, it turns out that the world isn't flat; it's paved.

"The city has triumphed. But as many of us know from personal experience, sometimes city roads are paved to hell. The city may win, but too often its citizens seem to lose. Every urban childhood is shaped by an onrush of extraordinary people and experiences - some delicious, like the sense of power that comes from a preteen's first subway trip alone; some less so, like a first exposure to urban gunfire. For every Fifth Avenue, there's a Mumbai slum; for every Sorbonne, there's a D.C. high school guarded by metal detectors.

"Indeed, for many Americans, the latter half of the twentieth century - the end of the industrial age - was an education not in urban splendor but in urban squalor. How well we learn from the lessons our cities teach us will determine whether our urban species will flourish in what can be a new golden age of the city."

delanceyplace.com 6/9/11 - religion fueled the american revolution

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in Virginia, in the period immediately before the American Revolution, dissenters from Anglican worship could still be fined and imprisoned. John Clay, a Baptist preacher who was the father of legendary American statesman Henry Clay, was among those jailed. Although "taxation without representation" was the ostensible cause of the Revolution, it was deeply felt resentment from Presbyterians, Baptists and others against this heavy-handed Anglicanism that provided the Revolution with much of its urgency and emotional weight. And preachers throughout America railed against King George, the head of the Anglican Church, as the "Great Satan":

"Around the time of his marriage, [Virginian John Clay] received 'the call' [to be a Baptist preacher]. Eventually he became the Baptists' chief apostle in Hanover County, working to change attitudes that were not necessarily irreligious but did find the Church of England emotionally unsatisfying and spiritually moribund. After the Great Awakening [which began in the 1730s] swept its revivalist fervor across the country, Virginians found the mandatory nature of Anglican worship - dissenters could be fined and even imprisoned - infuriating, and a simmering discontent over the lack of religious freedom helped stoke dissatisfaction with other aspects of British rule.

"Presbyterians became the dominant denomination in literate areas as converts in the Tidewater and Piedmont were matched by Scots-Irish migrations from Pennsylvania into the Shenandoah Valley. In the region between - Henrico, Chesterfield, and Hanover counties - the less literate gravitated to the Baptists, whose services were long on emotion and short on complicated liturgical teachings.

"Because of this, the number of Baptists markedly increased in the 1760s and 1770s, particularly among lower-class whites and slaves. Preachers could be unschooled and were always uncompensated, at least by any hierarchical authority. They came to their pulpits after an extraordinary religious experience referred to as 'the call.'

"After John Clay received the call, he organized churches in Henrico and Hanover counties, including a large congregation at Winn's Church in 1776. Most of his flock comprised a sect known as New Light Baptists, not exactly economic levelers but noted for simple attire and the practice of calling each other 'sister' and 'brother' regardless of social rank or economic status. They were clearly more democratic than class-conscious Anglicans, and congregations even allowed slaves to participate in worship services. That eccentric practice alone caused Anglican planter elites anxiety over the influence of Baptists, a troubling, troublesome lot who made even Presbyterians look respectable.

"Baptists took such contempt as a badge of honor. They and the Presbyterians grew increasingly angry about the power of establishment Anglicans, in particular evidenced by onerous taxes and reflexive persecution. At least once John Clay himself felt the weight of Anglican anger when he was jailed for his dissent. Such experiences, though, fueled rather than suppressed enthusiasm for religious liberty. As protests over British taxes became more strident, calls for spiritual freedom matched them. The drive for independence gained momentum, and the calls for disestablishing the Church of England became more vocal."

delanceyplace.com 6/8/11 - how to improve your memory

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the individuals with the most prodigious memories, those that win the United States and World Memory Championships, use a technique called the "method of loci" or "memory palace." Since the human brain is highly adept at remembering spaces and images, they simply visualize a house or palace, and visually place each item on a path through the house - using a highly unusual and memorable visual association for each item. Then, to remember, they simply take a mental "walk" through the house on that same path and "see" each item they need to remember. It turns out that this "memory palace" technique was used by the greats of antiquity during times when - because of the absence of the printing press and the internet - memory was a much more highly honored ability:

"Virtually all the nitty-gritty details we have about classical memory training were first described in a short, anonymously authored Latin rhetoric textbook called the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written sometime between 86 and 82 B.C. ... The techniques introduced in the Ad Herennium were widely practiced in the ancient world. In fact, in his own writings on the art of memory, Cicero says that the techniques are so well known that he felt he didn't need to waste ink describing them in detail. Once upon a time, ... memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.

"In a world with few books, memory was sacrosanct. Just look at Pliny the Elder's Natural History, the first-century encyclopedia that chronicled ... the most exceptional memories then known to history. 'King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army,' Pliny reports. 'Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people. King Pyrrhus's envoy Cineas knew those of the Senate and knighthood at Rome the day after his arrival ... A person in Greece named Charmadas recited the contents of any volumes in libraries that anyone asked him to quote, just as if he were reading them.' ... Seneca the Elder could repeat two thousand names in the order they'd been given to him. St. Augustine tells of a friend, Simplicius, who could recite Virgil by heart - backward. A strong memory was seen as the greatest virtue since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge.

"The [technique] is to create a space in the mind's eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the 'method of loci' by the Romans, such a building would later come to be called a 'memory palace.' Memory palaces don't necessarily have to be palatial - or even buildings. They can be routes through a town or station stops along a railway. ... They can be big or small, indoors or outdoors, real or imaginary, so long as there's some semblance of order that links one locus to the next, and so long as they are intimately familiar. The four-time U.S. memory champion Scott Hagwood uses luxury homes featured in Architectural Digest to store his memories. Dr. Yip Swee Chooi, the effervescent Malaysian memory champ, used his own body parts as loci to help him memorize the entire 56,OOO-word, 1,774-page Oxford Chinese-English dictionary. One might have dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of memory palaces, each built to hold a different set of memories. ...

" 'The thing to understand is that humans are very, very good at learning spaces,' [memory grand master] Ed Cooke remarked. 'Just to give an example, if you are left alone for five minutes in someone else's house you've never visited before, and you're feeling energetic and nosy, think about how much of that house could be fixed in your memory in that brief period. You'd be able to learn not just where all the different rooms are and how they connect with each other, but their dimensions and decoration, the arrangement of their contents, and where the windows are. Without really noticing it, you'd remember the whereabouts of hundreds of objects and all sorts of dimensions that you wouldn't even notice yourself noticing. If you actually add up all that information, it's like the equivalent of a short novel. But we don't ever register that as being a memory achievement. Humans just gobble up spatial information.'

"The principle of the memory palace is to use one's exquisite spatial memory to structure and store information whose order comes less naturally. ... The crucial thing was to choose a memory palace with which [you are] intimately familiar [such as] the house you grew up in. ...

" 'It's important that you deeply process that image, so you give it as much attention as possible,' Ed continued. [So if, for example, you want to remember the cottage cheese on your shopping list,] try to imagine [Claudia Schiffer swimming in a tub of cottage cheese]. And make sure you [visually place this cottage cheese image in a specific room in your mental house] ... The Ad Herennium advises readers at length about creating the images for one's memory palace: the funnier, lewder, and more bizarre, the better. ... The more vivid the image, the more likely it is to cleave to its locus. What distinguishes a great mnemonist is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Which is why [memory champion] Tony Buzan tells anyone who will listen that the World Memory Championship is less a test of memory than of creativity."

delanceyplace.com 6/7/11 - illinois is extended north to include chicago

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 11:38:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the completion of the Erie Canal and the extension of Illinois' border north to include the land that became Chicago saved the Union. The Mississippi River held an economic dominance over the middle of the country in the early 1800s, and put that dominance in the hands of Louisiana, Missouri and other slaveholding states. It was only the opening of the Erie Canal that created a self-contained East-West economic region among the Great Lakes states, and thus gave them economic independence from this Mississippi dominance. So when Congress was carving out the new state of Illinois under the dictates of the "Northwest Ordinance" - one of the three key "founding documents" in American History since it helped define how new states could be admitted to the country - it was careful to extend its borders to include a port on Lake Michigan:

"Illinois' northern border departed from that specified in the Northwest Ordinance. ... [which defined it] as 'an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan.' One problem with this border was that any state below the line would have no window on Lake Michigan and the important transportation network provided by the Great Lakes. In fairness to Thomas Jefferson, the primary architect of the Northwest Ordinance, in 1787 the Great Lakes would not be considered a major transportation network for another twenty years or so, when the idea of a canal connecting the lakes to the Hudson River (and thus to the Atlantic Ocean) began to take shape.

"Consequently, when the residents of Illinois decided to seek statehood in 1817, they now knew just how critical access to Lake Michigan would be to the economy of the state. In that same year, construction began on the Erie Canal. For this reason, Illinois sought to have its northern border adjusted to provide the state with a window on Lake Michigan. ... The Illinois statehood delegation urged Congress to locate its border nearly 6o miles north [of the border defined by the Northwest Ordinance]. And they succeeded. Why?

"When Illinois made its bid for statehood, Missouri was also becoming a state. Missouri sought admission to the Union as a slave state, whereas by law none of the states created from the Northwest Territory could have slavery. The drift toward Civil War was already a conscious concern, as revealed by Illinois statehood delegate Nathaniel Pope's observation that a new state connected to New York would afford 'additional security to the perpetuity of the Union.' What in the world was this man's logic? Illinois was not even close to New York. Plus, what did this have to do with Missouri? Not to mention Illinois'
northern border?

"As far as Missouri was concerned, the fear for the future security of the Union included the fact that so many of the nation's western rivers find their way to the Missouri River, which, in turn, finds its way to the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Missouri. This network of rivers represented a vast system of transportation for resources, and those resources all led to the slave-holding state of Missouri and point south.

"Illinois also borders the Mississippi River, and was poised to play a similar role in channeling resources through the south. But it also had the option of directing the resources from the rivers in northern Illinois to Lake Michigan. From Lake Michigan, the goods could proceed to Lake Huron, then Lake Erie, then into the Erie Canal to the Hudson River, at the mouth of which is Manhattan and access to the sea. This connection was what Nathaniel Pope was referring to when he linked Illinois to New York. And this connection was why Illinois could contribute to the security of the Union."

delancedelancyyplace.com 6/6/11 - andrew jackson marries a married woman

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Andrew Jackson, later the seventh president of the United States, married Rachel Donelson, a woman who was already married. It became a scandal that haunted them for the rest of their lives, and became fodder for the slanders of his opponents in the presidential campaign of 1828. Jackson believed it was the cause of his wife's death shortly after he was elected. Their love for each other was strong—she once compared Jackson's impact on her to that of the sun on snow: he had 'that Effect on my spirits when I see you returning to me againe nothing will animate or inliven me untill then.' He, in turn, behaved 'almost as if she were a doll':

"Jackson went about the business [of choosing a wife] with his usual ardor and determination, not knowing that the decisions he and his future wife impetuously made in the 1780s and 1790s would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

"Twenty-one-year-old Andrew Jackson arrived in Nashville in October 1788 and took up residence in a cabin next to the blockhouse of Rachel Stockley Donelson. Eating with the Donelsons, Andrew grew particularly fond of Rachel's daughter, also named Rachel, a lively young woman of about his own age. The well-matched couple's flirting quickly earned the enmity of her husband, Lewis Robards. Rachel had married Lewis in 1785 when her family lived briefly in Kentucky. The ill-matched Robardses had fallen out almost immediately, however, amid recriminations over mutual infidelity. Rachel returned to her family in Nashville. Lewis followed her. Jackson's attention to Rachel and her attention to him, meanwhile, compounded an ugly and at least potentially violent situation. After several angry exchanges with his rival, Lewis Robards returned to Virginia, where in December 1790 he petitioned the General Assembly for permission to sue for divorce on the grounds of Rachel's desertion and adultery.

"Andrew and Rachel had long since taken matters into their own hands. A year earlier they had gone to Natchez in the Spanish territory of Mississippi, where they lived as man and wife for several months; they then returned to Nashville, where Rachel was addressed as Mrs. Jackson. Decades later, responding to political attacks, Jackson's friends claimed the couple had been married in Natchez and that Rachel's bigamy was no more than an honest mistake. More recent students of the episode suspect, however, that Andrew and Rachel were establishing her desertion and adultery to speed the case through the distant legislature. Living together without legal sanction was not the cause celebre in 1790 that it became in 1828, when Jackson bitterly concluded that widespread public discussion of the scandal in the course of his campaign for the presidency contributed to Rachel's death, shortly after his election.

"On September 27, 1793, Lewis Robards obtained a decree of divorce on the grounds that 'Rachel Robards, hath deserted the plaintiff, Lewis Robards, and hath, and doth, still live in adultery with another man.' Learning this news in December, the Jacksons were officially married on January 18, 1794. In their first years together, the couple worried little about the not altogether uncommon circumstances of their courtship, concentrating instead on the more pressing challenge of establishing themselves as one of the most prominent households in the Cumberland Valley. ...

"In October 1803, a year after [contesting former Tennessee Governor John Sevier in an election for the prized position of general of the militia], Jackson and Sevier exchanged insults in a Knoxville street. Defending himself against Sevier's sarcasm, Jackson cited his services to Tennessee. 'Services?' replied the former governor. 'I know of no great service you have rendered the country, except taking a trip to Natchez with another man's wife.' 'Great God!' exclaimed Jackson, 'do you mention her sacred name?' The two drew their pistols but were restrained by friends. Later, an exchange of notes printed in a local newspaper once more very nearly prompted a gunfight.

"It was not the last time Jackson felt obliged to defend Rachel's honor with a pistol. Three years later, Jackson fought a formal duel with Charles Dickinson, an impetuous twenty-seven-year-old lawyer with an unruly temper and a fondness for horses, women, and alcohol. The two men fell out initially over the payment of a forfeit from an aborted horse race. The situation deteriorated rapidly when Jackson heard that Dickinson had taken Rachel's 'sacred name' into his 'polluted mouth.' The antagonists met on May 30, 1806, near the Red River in Logan County, Kentucky. Dickinson fired first. The bullet struck Jackson's chest, breaking two ribs and lodging near his heart. Despite shock and the loss of blood, Jackson kept his feet, took careful aim, and shot Dickinson dead."

"Jackson's behavior was extreme but not unusual."

delanceyplace.com 6/3/11 - how to fire someone

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 03:45:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Judy Garland gets fired by MGM during the early days of filming Annie Get Your Gun while coming off the set in full Indian costume. Garland was perhaps the most popular entertainer of her era - dazzling audiences on film, radio, television and records - but had become increasingly unreliable. MGM was the grandest studio of Hollywood's golden era. Annie Get Your Gun was one of the most popular Broadway shows of its day - and was viewed as a sure-fire Hollywood box office smash:

"Judy would use her amazing sense of humor to tell the story. It was a sad moment in the tale of what had once seemed the perfect relationship between a studio and a star who had achieved that status purely as a result of their own fostering. Yet, in the retelling by people who were in receipt of the tale, it all reads like the script of a very funny story indeed. George Schlatter, who was later to produce Judy's television show, told me about it.

" 'They really ripped her off when she did Annie Get Your Gun,' he said. 'She worked hard and did her best, but they thought she was difficult. Yet nobody would tell her. They decided to fire her on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend and when everybody had gone home. They sent a little guy down to the set to tell her, 'Miss Garland, you've been fired.' '

"That was an old Hollywood trick. Part of Tinseltown lore has it that Jack L. Warner, head of production at the studio he controlled with his brothers, would disappear when an employee was about to get sacked. It got so that every time Warner took off unexpectedly for some unknown destination, people would ask, 'Who's got fired now?' The answer would come when the assistant usually assigned to the firing task would reveal the name of the latest victim.

"Few of those ex-employees would react as Judy did, with that very unusual sense of humor that, strangely, came to its fore in the midst of some disaster or other - although it did take time for this firing to get the Garland touch. As George Schlatter explained to me: 'She was dressed as an Indian in war paint. She went through the halls of the Thalberg building at MGM looking for someone to attack. She had a tomahawk and was wearing moccasins and buckskins, running through the halls saying, 'I'm going to find them and scalp them.'

"It would have been even funnier to have been a fly on the side of her tepee at that firing moment. She told the gofer that she was being left high and dry. She didn't know what tribe she belonged to, so where was the reservation to which she had to go? The man, who didn't see things the way she did, just shrugged his shoulders and walked off, unaware of the humour. There are some people who just can't take a joke.

"Plainly, Judy was furious. George Schlatter understands how she felt. ... 'In Judy's case, they were cowards. They were all terrified of her.' "

delanceyplace.com 6/2/11 - rules for telephone sex

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - the rules that phone sex workers have to follow, as related by new phone sex worker "Lilycat":

"There were many mothers [among the phone sex workers]. All were great women, and talking with them during the slow periods was the best part of the job. Let's just say odd jobs collect odd characters to work at them, so the stories they had were great. ...

"The first call [I received when I started as a phone sex worker] was on the one-nine-hundred number, which requires the workers to follow special rules. The one-eight-hundred number involves the use of a credit card to talk to a woman, so the age of the caller can often be verified, but many callers who use the nine-hundred line are under eighteen. We had a fiber optic Big Brother occasionally monitoring the phone calls to make sure we followed the rules. So we needed to make sure that we obeyed the rules and didn't verbally give any hard-ons to minors (without them really working for it).

"In addition, the rules for phone sex lines out of California in the late '90s, as explained by my supervisors, specified that there could be no talk of bestiality, underage sex, or incest. This was taken so seriously that we couldn't even use phrases like 'Daddy's little girl' or 'Let me be your sex kitten' without verbally clarifying that we were over eighteen and not related to the callers, or that we weren't actually feline. Do you know what a c**k block it is, during a naughty-high-school-cheerleader-being-disciplined-by-the-principal story, when you have to stop and explain twice that you are an eighteen-year-old high school cheerleader?

"So, to make sure the callers were eighteen or older, we played the math game: We had to get the callers to give us not only their age, but year born and year graduated from high school. There was a chart of corresponding years so the phone sex workers wouldn't have to do the math. If callers messed up on the math, they failed, and not only did they not get any 'Baby, give it to me, give it to me hard:' but their coded phone numbers were put on a list. If any number appeared on the list more than three times, our supervisor would call the parents. Yes, the phone sex line would turn you in, junior.

"Along with Minor Math, we had to play Feed Me the Line. We couldn't use any sexually explicit words or phrases till the caller used them first. We couldn't actually talk dirty to callers till they talked dirty to us, and strangely enough, getting a very horny man to talk dirty to you isn't as easy as it seems. Most of the callers are slightly socially retarded toward women. If they were able to talk to women about what they wanted, they would be getting laid without Ma Bell playing madam. The typical caller expected you to be an easy verbal lay: Just dial the number and instant orgasmic satisfaction.

"But I couldn't give them what I knew they wanted without them 'feeding me the line.' So it was a conversational tug-of-war: 'Talk dirty to me.' 'Tell me about what you want me to do for you.' 'Talk dirty to me.' 'Come on, baby, tell me your fantasy.' 'I want you to talk dirty to me.' 'Tell me exactly what you want me to talk about.' 'Talk dirty to me.' And so on and so on."

delanceyplace.com 6/1/11 - scots-irish come to america

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Scotch-Irish, also known as Scots-Irish or Ulster Scots, were among the toughest frontiersmen in American history, and included such legends as David Crockett and Andrew Jackson. They were first transplanted from Scotland to the province of Ulster in Ireland in the early 1600s by England's King James for two reasons - first as a way to remove troublesome Anglo-Scottish border raiding clans, and also to provide fighting men who could help subjugate the native Irish in Ireland. Some 200,000 then migrated to America during colonial times to escape the conflicts they faced in Ireland. They were religious dissidents - Protestants opposed to England's official Anglican religion - and they fought in England against the crown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, they fought against the crown again in the American Revolution, they were fierce Indian fighters, and they fought against the North in the American Civil War:

"The [forbears of David] Crockett came to America just as other Ulster Scots did, aboard a heaving and crowded immigrant ship. Some Ulstermen and their families, weary of warfare and religious persecution, were so desperate for free and fertile land that they paid their way by signing on as indentured servants. But first they had to survive the dangerous Atlantic crossing, which, depending on the winds, could take anywhere from three weeks to three months. Not only were the ships overloaded, but rations were short, the food vermin-ridden, and the water stagnant. The entire vessel, especially lower decks, reeked from the stench of dysentery, vomit, sweat, and rot. Every soul aboard suffered from lice infestations and a multitude of other maladies. Hunger and thirst were constant, and some passengers died by drinking saltwater or their own urine. Burial at sea was particularly difficult; survivors had to watch the shrouded corpses of loved ones cast into the sea. The despair and tension often erupted into brawls, even between family members.

"Yet, even with all the horrors that had to be endured aboard ship, the weary and bedraggled passengers believed they had arrived in the Promised Land when the journey to American shores finally ended. Immigrant ships docked at various ports of entry, where enticing advertisements urged the new arrivals to help settle the lands opening up in the west. Philadelphia became the Scots-Irish favored port of entry, since the Pennsylvania colony, established by Quakers, appeared to welcome them. The puritanical New England colonies were less tolerant of the newcomers and had no use for either Scots or Irish.

"The first of the Ulster settlements appeared at Donegal, Pennsylvania, not far from the larger town of Lancaster. Others sprang up beyond, in the rich Cumberland Valley. The Ulster Scots, mostly tenant farmers, were motivated to find a place of their own where land was cheap and they could achieve a reasonable measure of economic freedom and opportunity. The primary pattern of their western migration took them out of Pennsylvania along the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, continuing south and west into what would become Tennessee, or, as the Crocketts did, into North Carolina and then to Tennessee.

"Many of the Scots-Irish migrated as whole congregations, or family groups, just as they had done with their Presbyterian ministers from Scotland to Ireland to America. The extended family unit was extremely tight-knit, and it was common for entire communities of these pioneers to migrate along the same route, stopping at the same places along the way. ...

"An ethnic melange of settlers followed the Great Wagon Road and the well-trodden routes of the [frontiersman], including English, Welsh, Irish, German, Swiss, French Huguenot, and some African slaves. Most of the newcomers, however, were Scots-Irish, such as the Crocketts. Reflecting early class division in the fledgling Republic, all of them had long detested the autocratic power of the British king and resented what they considered a conspiracy to take away their God-given freedom."

delanceyplace.com 5/31/11 - america sells indigo

Tue, 31 May 2011 03:38:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - until the most recent times, color dyes were rare and precious commodities upon which power and fortunes were built. Indigo, the brilliant blue dye made from plants, was one of America's slavery-based cash crops. But long before it was exported by America, indigo dye had been one of the world's great treasures for thousands of years. Referred to by some as "blue gold," it caught the imagination of connoisseurs, and merchants and colonialists with its power to bewitch and its transcendent beauty - and the value and demand for indigo became ungovernable. It sparked bitter trade wars, and touched off impassioned European and North American legislation and political debate and became known as "The Devil's Dye:"

"Blue is one of nature's rarest colors. Indigo, a dye obtained from the tiny leaves of small parasitic shrubs that are part of the Indigofererearsa tribe, creates the bluest of blues. For almost five millennia, in every culture and every major religion, indigo has been one of the world's most valued pigments. No color has been prized so highly or for so long, or been at the center of such turbulent human encounters.

"In the ancient trans-Saharan trade, whose peak extended from the eighth until the late sixteenth century, camel-powered desert ships carried indigo, along with African captives, gold, salt, kola, and other sumptuary items like ivory and ostrich feathers, to Mediterranean hubs where African, Arab, Asian, and European markets converged. ... For art and decorative architecture, indigo was ... used to symbolize the ancient caliphate, the royal court, the church and mosque, the canopy of heaven, a holy person's robes.

"Indigo was used as a hair dye and an eye cosmetic in Europe. ... It was burned as incense to ward off bad spirits. It was used as an antiseptic, a contraceptive, and an abortifacient; a cure for syphilis; and its root was regarded as a powerful sexual stimulant. Bodies were tattooed with it for healing purposes, particularly at the joints as relief from arthritis. ...

"India's production of indigo in the Rajshahi region was so lucrative that villagers were forced to harvest the plants by means of terror and torture. It was said that no indigo box was dispatched to England without being smeared in human blood, and resistance to that tyranny sparked a two-year peasant revolt - the Indigo Revolt of 1859 - that [Mohandas] Gandhi joined as his first civil action. The revolt brought a final end to the mass cultivation of indigo in the colonies.

"Indigo was a cornerstone of the transatlantic slave trade - one of the hidden commodities, like cotton, sugar, salt, and gold, that fueled European colonial empires. ... It grew wild along the southern coast of the United States. In the mid-1700s, Eliza Lucas, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a South Carolina plantation owner who was trained as a botanist ... is credited with introducing [it as] a crop more profitable than rice, which, because it had properties to repel the mosquitoes carrying malaria and yellow fever that caused the deaths of slaves - then two thirds of the population of the Carolinas - had inestimably higher returns. By the eve of the American Revolution, when cubes of indigo replaced paper currency, South Carolina planters were exporting 1.1 million pounds of indigo to Europe."

delanceyplace.com 5/27/11 - love is more powerful than understanding

Fri, 27 May 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Alan Jay Lerner comments on the unhappy ending of his long-term Broadway collaboration with Fritz Loewe, a relationship through which they had both achieved stratospheric success, yet one that came to an unclimactic end during the production of their last smash musical hit - Camelot:

"By the end of [tryout] week Fritz and I were seeing less and less of each other. Irritations and differences between us that had been long forgotten and were of little consequence at the time had now become the subject of questions by interviewers. Our replies traveled from mouth to mouth and by the time they reached us they were unrecognizable distortions. If we had stayed steadfastly and constantly together as we always had in the past we would have laughed, rowed, or shrugged but in the end gone on about our business. We did not. I do not know why we did not. I may have thought I knew then but whatever I thought, I am certain I was wrong. I have a feeling the reason was far more insidious, something of which neither of us was aware and which affected each of us in different ways. I have a feeling it may have been too much success.

"Success, as I mentioned earlier, can be a creative stimulant. It encourages reaching in and reaching out. But it can also take the concessions of collaboration and call them compromise. It can embitter as often as it elates and inflates and it can weaken as much as it toughens. It can magnify faults and unearth a few new ones and its only virtue is when it is forgotten. Perhaps I was too disdainful of the words of others and Fritz too vulnerable. Perhaps I misinterpreted our differences as lack of support and he misinterpreted mine as heroics. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I will never know. Too much was never said. In the end we were a little like the couple being discussed in one of Noel Coward's early plays. 'Do they fight?' said one. 'Oh, no,' said the other. 'They're much too unhappy to fight.'"

"Fritz, as I had expected he would, had made up his mind that for him Camelot was the end of the line. Only sixty, and a vigorous one at that, both vertically and horizontally, the certainty of struggle far outweighed the uncertainty of success, and even success now seemed superfluous. His health was good and he liked it that way. He loved Palm Springs and he loved the French Rivera. He decided to devote his energies to conserving them.

"There were no formal farewells, no goodbyes, nothing to mark the end of the long voyage we had been on together. He went to Palm Springs. I went to Europe. And that was that.

"It was not until two years later that I understood for the first time what our partnership had truly meant. I had begun to write a new musical. The discovery that overwhelmed me was less a creative one than a personal one. I realized that over the years, Fritz and I had unconsciously built an invisible fortress around our collaboration. When the drawbridge was up, it protected us against the brickbats of humanity and our personal lives seemed far away and lost the sharp outline of reality. Fritz joked about my problems and I, his. Marital difficulties, for instance, lost a good deal of their anxiety when Fritz would say: 'You are a funny little boy. You build a nest and then shit in it.' Whether it was true or not was of no consequence. We laughed and were soon feverishly working. And nothing else mattered.

"I cannot imagine not writing and I shall undoubtedly go on doing so until there is either no more theatre or no more me. But one thing is certain: there will never be another Fritz. No relationship will ever be as close, both professionally and personally. For me there will never again be exactly the same creative exhileration. Writing will never again be as much fun. A collaboration as intense as ours inescapably had to be complex. But I loved him more than I understood or misunderstood him and I know he loved me more than he understood or misunderstood me."

delanceyplace.com 5/26/11 - a higher i.q. score

Thu, 26 May 2011 05:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - I.Q. test results:

"Children develop only as the environment demands development. In 1981, New Zealand-based psychologist James Flynn discovered just how profoundly true that statement is. Comparing raw I.Q. scores over nearly a century, Flynn saw that they kept going up: every few years, the new batch of I.Q. test takers seemed to be smarter than the old batch. Twelve-year-olds in the 1980s performed better than twelve-year-olds in the 1970s, who performed better than twelve-year-olds in the 1960s, and so on. This trend wasn't limited to a certain region or culture, and the differences were not trivial. On average, I.Q. test takers improved over their predecessors by three points every ten years - a staggering difference of eighteen points over two generations.

"The differences were so extreme, they were hard to wrap one's head around. Using a late-twentieth-century average score of 100, the comparative score for the year 1900 was calculated to be about 60 - leading to the truly absurd conclusion, acknowledged Flynn, 'that a majority of our ancestors were mentally retarded.' The so-called Flynn effect raised eyebrows throughout the world of cognitive research. Obviously, the human race had not evolved into a markedly smarter species in less than one hundred years. Something else was going on.

"For Flynn, the pivotal clue came in his discovery that the increases were not uniform across all areas but were concentrated in certain subtests. Contemporary kids did not do any better than their ancestors when it came to general knowledge or mathematics. But in the area of abstract reasoning, reported Flynn, there were 'huge and embarrassing' improvements. The further back in time he looked, the less test takers seemed comfortable with hypotheticals and intuitive problem solving. Why? Because a century ago, in a less complicated world, there was very little familiarity with what we now consider basic abstract concepts. '[The intelligence of] our ancestors in 1900 was anchored in everyday reality,' explains Flynn. 'We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical ... Since 1950, we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot.'

"Examples of abstract notions that simply didn't exist in the minds of our nineteenth-century ancestors include the theory of natural selection (formulated in 1864), and the concepts of control groups (1875) and random samples (1877). A century ago, the scientific method itself was foreign to most Americans. The general public had simply not yet been conditioned to think abstractly.

"The catalyst for the dramatic I.Q. improvements, in other words, was not some mysterious genetic mutation or magical nutritional supplement but what Flynn described as 'the [cultural] transition from pre-scientific to post- scientific operational thinking.' Over the course of the twentieth century, basic principles of science slowly filtered into public consciousness, transforming the world we live in. That transition, says Flynn, 'represents nothing less than a liberation of the human mind.'

"The scientific world-view, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial people. This has paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable.

"Perhaps the most striking of Flynn's observations is this: 98 percent of IQ test takers today score better than the average test taker in 1900. The implications of this realization are extraordinary. It means that in just one century, improvements in our social discourse and our schools have dramatically raised the measurable intelligence of almost everyone.

"So much for the idea of fixed intelligence."

delanceyplace.com 5/25/11 - "the american people love to be humbugged"

Wed, 25 May 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the Cardiff Man, P.T. Barnum, and the Wizard of Oz. The Cardiff Man, a twelve-foot petrified giant "discovered" outside of Syracuse, New York, was perhaps the greatest hoax of the nineteenth century. New Yorker Phineas T. Barnum was one of the greatest businessmen of the age, the empresario of an era that saw the U.S. economy on the verge of becoming the largest in the world. L. Frank Baum, later the author of The Wizard of Oz, was then a Syracuse castorine-oil merchant who, along with all other citizens of the town, watched the hoax unfold:

"In October of 1869 an unusual bit of news came out of Cardiff, a town near
Syracuse. Two workmen were digging a well at a farm there when their
shovels struck something large and hard. After a little more digging and dusting, they discovered nothing other than a giant petrified man. ...

"Within days of the discovery of this fabled giant, William Newell, the owner of the farm in Cardiff, erected an enormous tent over the finding and began charging a quarter to come inside for a viewing. When he couldn't control the crowds, Newell doubled the price. Before long the Cardiff Giant became a tourist attraction, drawing crowds every day, including religious groups who saw in the stone beast something of biblical significance. 'The interest in the Stone Giant found at Cardiff increases,' wrote the Syracuse Standard. 'Go where you will in this city, it is the topic.' When the deluge continued unabated, Mr. Newell agreed to sell the giant to a group of Syracuse businessmen for $37,5oo, an outrageous amount that could purchase an entire city block. The new owners put it on display in a leased storefront downtown. The admission price was raised again, and the local economy was boosted by the traffic.

"Archaeologists, meanwhile, examined the statue and proclaimed that it was a fraud, that the 'ancient relic' was in fact quite new. Soon after this report a Binghamton factory owner named George Hull admitted that he had commissioned its creation - just to prove how easy it was to fool Americans, especially religious-minded ones. It all grew out of an argument Hull, an avowed atheist, had waged with a fundamentalist preacher who said he literally believed the Genesis passage about how giants once roamed the Earth. Hull had sculptors craft the statue from gypsum before shipping it to the farm of his cousin William Newell, who buried it and kept the secret until they hired workmen to 'dig a well.' These were the workmen who 'found' the giant.

"For many people the story ended there, but Frank found the final twist the most compelling part of the tale. Even after the hoax was widely reported, the crowds kept coming, until the famous showman and museum curator P. T. Barnum offered to buy the giant for $60,000. After all, Barnum specialized in locating and displaying fake mermaids and mummies and other dubious artifacts. He made a fortune charging admission to see these and other curiosities at his American Museum in New York City. But that structure had just recently burned to the ground after a quarter century of brisk business, and now Barnum was desperate for spectacular new attractions for a new venue.

"When his offer was rejected, an angry Barnum commissioned a replica. In ads Barnum claimed that his Cardiff Giant was the real one and the original was the fake. This outraged the Syracuse businessman who was the majority owner of the 'real' one, causing him to proclaim, 'Well, I guess there's a sucker born every minute.' The entire matter ended up in court - until an exasperated judge threw the whole case out. Later, the famous 'sucker born every minute' line was erroneously attributed to Barnum himself. To Barnum, however, the true insight ran even deeper, and it was this bit of wisdom that made him one of the wealthiest men of his time: 'The American people love to be humbugged,' he observed.

"It was this very insight that later inspired Frank Baum to turn the Wizard of Oz into a fraud. Before meeting the Great Oz, the companions expect him to be nothing but a wonderful wizard. But then they find him to be a giant head who bellows mean and terrible things. When they next encounter him, however, Toto pulls away the partition to reveal a little old man who breaks down and admits that 'I am a humbug,' confessing that he created illusions with ceiling wires and ventriloquism.

" 'Really,' says the Scarecrow, 'you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being such a humbug.'

" 'I am - I certainly am,' answers the little man sorrowfully, 'but it was the only thing I could do.' The people there were eager to be deluded and were willing 'to do anything I wished them to.'

"In telling the story of the real fake and the fake fake, Frank Baum would never forget this powerful lesson: Americans not only don't mind being fooled, or humbugged, but they desperately want to be taken for a ride - and the greater the number of people who are strung along by a great humbug, the more others want to be in on it, too."

delanceyplace.com 5/24/11 - america bans the theater

Mon, 23 May 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the 1880's, L. Frank Baum, a young man who later gained fame and fortune as the author of The Wizard of Oz, was trying to establish himself as a playwright, actor, and theater manager in the small oil patch towns of western New York and Pennsylvania. He had been born to a family of means, and his new profession was held in low regard, so he used pen names to avoid bringing shame to the family name:

"As a profession, the business of acting and staging plays was not something that would win him much admiration in polite society, as theater was not then considered respectable. Theater on Broadway was a movable feast, relocating over the years from seedy downtown districts up to Herald Square. There had been various forms of theater in America going back to the 1750s, but the outcome of the Revolutionary War had given the Puritans the chance to rise up and start closing theaters. Church leaders saw theaters as competition with the kind of indoctrination they provided. Laws were passed in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island banning the performance of plays. Preachers spoke of theaters as 'the Devil's Synagogues,' places where fabricated human emotions were on display. The contempt continued into the nineteenth century, a time in which many religious leaders forbade dancing in public. Acting was considered an even viler form of expression, one step down from public drunkenness.

"Most anti-theater ordinances were gradually relaxed, but events didn't help the cause. In 1849, during a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House in New York, a dispute between rival actors may have instigated tensions between different classes of people in the audience. Gunfire erupted and the militia was called in to quell what became known as the Astor Place Riot, pure bedlam that resulted in twenty-five deaths and injuries to more than a hundred other audience members. Worse, President Lincoln was shot in a theater, by an actor no less. The most popular forms of theater in the decades after the war were minstrel shows, burlesque, and vaudeville, all considered among the lowest forms of entertainment. Clergy continued to warn against 'hotbeds of hedonism.' In 1873 a theater in Brooklyn burned down, killing three hundred, prompting a preacher to proclaim that this was evidence of 'God punishing them for being in an evil place.' In the eyes of many churchgoers, actors were con men, and actresses were prostitutes.

"In this light it isn't so surprising to learn that Frank Baum would have been deemed undesirable for marriage. He probably took on the pen name Louis E. Baum for this very reason. Sometimes he performed under the name George Brooks, to avoid bringing shame to the Baum family name."

delanceyplace.com 5/23/11 - america's aid to pakistan

Mon, 23 May 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the United States routinely gives billions of dollars to foreign governments to influence the progress and policies of those governments. Yet the outcomes of those investments are unpredictable, and often the opposite of what we intended. During the Cold War, India was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and so we shunned it, while Pakistan was willing to assume our anti-Communist rhetoric and so we rewarded it:

"It's the end of the Second World War, and the United States is deciding what to do about two immense, poor, densely populated countries in Asia. America chooses one of the countries, becoming its benefactor. Over the decades, it pours billions of dollars into that country's economy, training and equipping its military and its intelligence services. The stated goal is to create a reliable ally with strong institutions and a modern, vigorous democracy. The other country, meanwhile, is spurned because it forges alliances with America's enemies.

"The country not chosen was India, which 'tilted' toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Pakistan became America's protégé, firmly supporting its fight to contain Communism. The benefits that Pakistan accrued from this relationship were quickly apparent: in the nineteen-sixties, its economy was an exemplar. India, by contrast, was a byword for basket case. Fifty years then went by. What was the result of this social experiment?

"India has become the state that we tried to create in Pakistan. It is a rising economic star, militarily powerful and democratic, and it shares American interests. Pakistan, however, is one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a covert sponsor of terrorism. Politically and economically, it verges on being a failed state. And, despite Pakistani avowals to the contrary, America's worst enemy, Osama bin Laden, had been hiding there for years - in strikingly comfortable circumstances - before U.S. commandos finally tracked him down and killed him, on May 2nd."

delanceyplace.com 5/20/11 - in vitro meat

Fri, 20 May 2011 03:00:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - research to discover ways to grow meat in a laboratory:

"After World War II, Dr. Willem van Eelen studied medicine at the University of Amsterdam. A professor showed the students how he had been able to get a piece of muscle tissue to grow in the laboratory. This demonstration inspired van Eelen to consider the possibility of growing edible meat without having to raise or slaughter animals. Imagine, he thought, protein-rich food that could be grown like crops, no matter what the climate or other environmental conditions, without killing any living creatures.

"If anything, the idea is more potent now. The world population was just more than two billion in 1940, and global warming was not a concern. Today the planet is home to three times as many people. According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock business accounts for about 18 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions - an even larger contribution than the global transportation sector. The organization expects worldwide meat consumption to nearly double between 2002 and 2050. ...

"Even Winston Churchill thought in vitro meat was a good idea.'Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under suitable medium,' he predicted in a 1932 book, Thoughts and Adventures. For most of the 20th century, however, few took the idea seriously.

"Utrecht scientists [have] tried to extract and develop embryonic stem cell lines from pigs. Such cells would, in normal conditions, be able to duplicate every day for long periods, meaning 10 cells could grow into a staggering amount of potential meat in just two months-more than 50,000 metric tons. 'Culturing embryonic stem cells would be ideal for this purpose since these cells have an (almost) infinite self-renewal capacity,' according to a 2009 report by the Utrecht team.

"In theory, one such cell line would be sufficient to literally feed the world. Until now, however, such cell lines have been developed only from mice, rats, rhesus monkeys and humans. Embryonic cells from farm animals have had a tendency to differentiate quickly - and of their own accord - into specialized cells. In the report, Utrecht team's porcine cells often veered toward 'a neural lineage' - brains, not bacon. ...

"Breakthroughs in all these areas will take money, of course.In 2008 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) offered $1 million to the first person or persons who could grow commercially viable chicken in a lab by 2012. But that was mainly a publicity stunt and no help to scientists who need money to get research done now. More seriously, the Dutch government recently pledged roughly €800,000 toward a new four-year project that would continue the stem cell research at Utrecht - and also initiate a study on the social and moral questions related to in vitro meat.

"Some see social acceptance as the biggest barrier of all to producing in vitro meat on a commercial scale. 'I've mentioned cultured meat to scientists, and they all think, 'great idea,' ' says Oxford's Tuomisto. 'When I talk to nonscientists, they are more afraid of it.' "

delanceyplace.com 5/19/11 - the long walk

Thu, 19 May 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - the Long Walk. In January 1864, the U.S. Army forcibly removed between 8,000 and 9,000 Navajo Indians from their traditional lands, in the eastern Arizona Territory and the western New Mexico Territory, to internment camps in Bosque Redondo in the Pecos River valley. They had been conquered by a campaign whereby the U.S. Army had systematically destroyed their crops and other food sources, and old and weak among the Navajo had to either surrender or die. During the Long Walk, at least 200 died or were kidnapped along the 300-mile trek that took over 18 days to travel by foot. Their settlement in Bosque Redondo had such catastrophic consequences in death and disease and was so disastrously expensive that the U.S. returned them to a reservation in their original homeland in a second "Long Walk" in June 1868:

"Most of them were guilty of nothing more than being Navajo. The errant young men responsible for most of the raids represented but a small percentage of the tribe. Yet now the many would pay for the malefactions of the few; now all the [Navajo] would finally suffer for the trouble caused by its most incorrigible members. It was the poorest Navajos, the ladrones, who had surrendered first. They were the sickest and weakest, the ones who had lacked the wherewithal to hold out. Now they had less than nothing—not their health, not their animals, not even a country. ...

"Now they had food, too, if that's what you called the rations the [U.S. Army] provided along the march. The bacon was rancid and caused the Navajos to retch. They had coffee beans but no means to grind them. The daily ration of wheat flour was virtually useless. Although there was nothing particularly wrong with it, most Navajos had never seen flour before and didn't know what to do with it. So they just stuffed it into their mouths, uncooked—and naturally grew sick. ...

"Kindness may have been the [U.S.] policy, but as almost always happens in the escalating confusion of a refugee evacuation, the best intentions slipped. Army command devolved into chaos. Soldiers raped women, denied rations, and pushed elderly marchers to the brink of death. Cruel guards occasionally shot those who couldn't keep up andleft them to rot where they lay. And soldiers looked the other way as old enemies of the Navajos—the Zuni, the Jemez, and the New Mexicans—had their fun with the helpless trains of emigrants, stealing women and children away in the night. The slave raids became so prevalent that an American officer circulated a warning that all guards 'must exercise extreme vigilance or the Indians' children will be stolen from them and sold.'

"Hundreds of Navajos succumbed to sickness, exposure, and exhaustion. The erratic spring weather for which New Mexico is famous only worsened the ordeal. On March 21 a blizzard fell on a party of nearly a thousand marchers. Army quartermasterswere not prepared for the storm—they had not procured enough firewood or blankets to go around. Many of the Indians were nearly naked and some developed frostbite. By the time this unfortunate column reached the bosque, 110 Navajos had died."

delanceyplace.com 5/18/11 - chess grandmasters have average intelligence

Wed, 18 May 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - chess grandmasters have average cognitive skills and average memories for matters outside of chess, and only show their extraordinary skills within the discipline of chess. This suggests that expertise in chess (and most other areas) has less to do with analytical skills - the ability to project and weigh the relative merits of hundreds of options - and more to do with long-term immersion and pattern recognition - having experienced and "stored" thousands of game situations and thus having the ability to pluck an optimal answer from among those stored memories. It also suggests that expertise may be less a result of analytical prowess and more a result of passion, love or obsession for a given subject area - enough passion to have spent the hours necessary to accumulate a robust set of experiences and memories in that area:

"The classic example of how memories shape the perception of experts comes from what would seem to be the least intuitive of fields: chess. Practically since the origins of the modern game in the fifteenth century, chess has been regarded as the ultimate test of cognitive ability. In the 1920s, a group of Russian scientists set out to quantify the intellectual advantages of eight of the world's best chess players by giving them a battery of basic cognitive and perceptual tests. To their surprise, the researchers found that the grand masters didn't perform significantly better than average on any of their tests. The greatest chess players in the world didn't seem to possess a single major cognitive advantage.

"But if chess masters aren't, as a whole, smarter than lesser chess players, then what are they? In the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist and chess aficionado named Adriaan de Groot asked what seemed like a simple question: What separates merely good chess players from those who are world-class? Did the best-class players see more moves ahead ? Did they ponder more possible moves? Did they have better tools for analyzing those moves? Did they simply have a better intuitive grasp of the dynamics of the game?

"One of the reasons chess is such a satisfying game to play and to study is that your average chess buff can be utterly befuddled by a master's move. Often the best move seems entirely counterintuitive. Realizing this, De Groot pored through old games between chess masters and selected a handful of board positions where there was definitely one correct, but not obvious, move to be made. He then presented the boards to a group of international chess masters and top club players. He asked them to think aloud while they brooded over the proper move.

"What De Groot uncovered was an even bigger surprise than what his Russian predecessors had found. For the most part, the chess experts didn't look more moves ahead, at least not at first. They didn't even consider more possible moves. ... They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away.

"It was as if the chess experts weren't thinking so much as reacting. When De Groot listened to their verbal reports, he noticed that they described their thoughts in different language than less experienced chess players. They talked about configurations of pieces like 'pawn structures' and immediately noticed things that were out of sorts, like exposed rooks. They weren't seeing the board as thirty-two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension.

"Grand masters literally see a different board. Studies of their eye movements have found that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players, suggesting that they're absorbing information from multiple squares at once. Their eyes also dart across greater distances, and linger for less time at any one place. They focus on fewer different spots on the board, and those spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move.

"But the most striking finding of all from these early studies of chess experts was their astounding memories. The experts could memorize entire boards after just a brief glance. And they could reconstruct long-ago games from memory. In fact, later studies confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player somebody is. And these chess positions are not simply encoded in transient short-term memory. Chess experts can remember positions from games for hours, weeks, even years afterward. Indeed, at a certain point in every chess master's development, keeping mental track of the pieces on the board becomes such a trivial skill that they can take on several opponents at once, entirely in their heads.

"As impressive as the chess masters' memories were for chess games, their memories for everything else were notably unimpressive. When the chess experts were shown random arrangements of chess pieces - ones that couldn't possibly have been arrived at through an actual game - their memory for the board was only slightly better than chess novices'. They could rarely remember the positions of more than seven pieces (which is the average for most people). These were the same chess pieces, and the same chessboards. So why were they suddenly limited by the magical number seven?

"The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don't remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. A board of randomly arranged chess pieces has no context - there are no similar boards to compare it to, no past games that it resembles, no ways to meaningfully chunk it. Even to the world's best chess player it is, in essence, noise.

"In the same way that a few pages ago we used our knowledge of historic dates to chunk the twelve-digit number, chess masters use the vast library of chess patterns that they've cached away in long-term memory to chunk the board. At the root of the chess master's skill is that he or she simply has a richer vocabulary of chunks to recognize. Which is why it is so rare for anyone to achieve world-class status in chess - or any other field - without years of experience. Even Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess prodigy of all time, had been playing chess intensely for nine years before he was recognized as a grand master at age fifteen.

"Contrary to all the old wisdom that chess is an intellectual activity based on analysis, many of the chess master's important decisions about which moves to make happen in the immediate act of perceiving the board. Like [experts in other areas such as the veteran] SWAT officer who immediately notices the bomb [when others don't], the chess master looks at the board and simply sees the most promising move. The process usually happens within five seconds, and you can actually see it transpiring in the brain. Using magneto-encephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding new information. The experts are interpreting the present board in term of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower-ranked players are seeing the board as something new."

delanceyplace.com 5/17/11 - you can't turn back the clock

Tue, 17 May 2011 00:37:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - by 1971, Led Zeppelin had performed in front of crowds as large as 200,000 and was earning close to $2 million (in today's dollars) per performance, but wanted to reward their fans from their earliest days by returning to perform in the small clubs they had barely filled three years before. As reported by tour manager Richard Cole:

"Back in England, Zeppelin was performing again, this time on a Return to the Clubs tour - an idea conceived by [manager] Peter Grant. Amid the band's enormous success, Peter never let himself forget the band's early days when they struggled to get attention at home. In the cramped clubs in which they played in those days, they had a small but loyal following. And Peter still felt he owed them a debt.

" 'This new tour is a way of saying 'thank you' to those fans who have been with us since sixty-eight and sixty-nine," Peter had said when he suggested the idea. So during the remainder of March, we played in a dozen clubs, including the Marquee in London, the Mayfair Ballroom in Newcastle, the Boat Club in Nottingham, and Stepmother's in Birmingham. With audiences averaging 300 to 400 people, these dates were the ultimate contrast to the Bath Festival [with its crowd of 200,000].

"The clubs tour, however, was much better as a concept than as reality. None of us particularly enjoyed it. The clubs were small, and the demand to see Zeppelin was, of course, much larger than it had been in the early years. This was now the biggest band in the world, and literally thousands of people were turned away at the doors. Disappointed fans sometimes took out their frustrations and anger on whatever they could take a swing at - whether it was the clubs' bouncers or nearby street lamps. On a couple of occasions, the police were called to prevent a full-fledged riot from erupting.

"After the scares in Ireland [where Zeppelin had toured in spite of the violence between Protestants and Catholics], I had insisted on taking two bodyguards with us on the British tour, and Peter agreed. Two brawny protectors, Patsy Collins and Jim Callaghan, gave me some peace of mind for most of those U.K. performances. Nevertheless, the Return to the Clubs tour was not incident-free. As Zeppelin performed at the Nottingham Boat Club, a fellow in his mid-twenties with a satanic face approached the stage, hovering for a minute or two as the band played 'Whole Lotta Love.' He had a knife tucked in his belt, and although it was still in its case, I decided not to wait to see what might happen next. I rushed toward the front of the stage and slammed my body into the bastard, wrestling him to the ground. Then with the help of Patsy, we dragged him backstage. ...

" 'What the f**k is that knife for?' I shouted as I stood over him, poised for another punch.

" 'My girlfriend loves Robert Plant,' he mumbled. 'Whenever she swoons over him, it drives me crazy. Sometimes I feel like killing both of them.' ...

"When we played the Mayfair, just before the band went onstage, Jimmy was bitching about the entire tour. 'Once you've played in the big places, these small clubs are murder. It's nice to be near the audience, but you forget how small the dressing rooms are. At this point in our careers, I think we're entitled to more luxury than this. This is really hard to believe.'

"With the larger venues, Zeppelin had gotten spoiled very quickly. They had become used to big dressing rooms and catered food. They expected excellent sound systems, not makeshift speakers and overloaded fuse boxes that hemorrhaged and died in the middle of a set. So even though Zeppelin was eager to expose their fans to songs from their forthcoming album - songs like 'Stairway to Heaven,' 'Rock and Roll,' and 'Black Dog' - I could see them cringe every time the sound system would screech, scratch, and squeal.

"There wasn't much of a financial payoff, either. The band took a percentage of the door, but when you're only squeezing three hundred and fifty people into a club, the band's share covered gas money and maybe a few bottles of whiskey. 'It's no Madison Square Garden,' Peter said, showing a knack for understatement.

"Peter still felt that the entire exercise was worth it, at least in terms of public relations. Even so, he never suggested repeating the Return to the Clubs tour. Neither did anyone else."

delanceyplace.com 5/16/11 - "china's sorrow" and the grand canal

Mon, 16 May 2011 01:26:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - for more than a thousand years, China has generally been the largest kingdom or country in the world - both in the size of its population and its geography. This can be attributed to its large, continuous landmass - as evidenced by the very high ratio of land to coastline (the very opposite of Europe), but also by its unparalleled achievement in building the Grand Canal. The total length of the Grand Canal is 1,776 kilometers, and it connects China's two great rivers, the Yellow and the Yangtze, as it travels from Beijing to the city of Hangzhou near the port city of Shanghai. The oldest parts of the canal date back to the 5th century BC, although the various sections were finally combined during the Sui Dynasty (581-618 CE). The Canal was one of the achievements led China to being perceived as "the most precocious preindustrial civilization in world history":

"The outstanding, transformational event that catapulted Chinese civilization above all its contemporaries, and marked one of water history's turning points, was the completion in the early seventh century AD of the Grand Canal - still mankind's longest artificial waterway, extending over a distance equal to that between New York and Florida. The south-north-running canal linked China's two disparate, giant river systems and habitats to create the world's largest inland waterway transportation network. Just as the Nile had unified Upper and Lower Egypt, China became integrated into a militarily defensible nation-state with a strong, centralized government that commanded an expansive diversity of highly productive economic resources. The Grand Canal played a catalytic role not only in China's becoming the world's most precocious civilization during the Middle Ages but also in the country's fateful fifteenth-century decision to turn its back on the rest of the world that ultimately led to its prolonged, slow decline.

"The Grand Canal was so successful because it bridged China's underlying hydrological fault line: north China's chronic insufficiency of accessible freshwater resources to fully irrigate its superabundance of rich soil to achieve its maximum food-growing potential, and south China's opposite profile of having more water than could be productively employed on its less fertile soils. Managing this north-south water and land resource mismatch has been a recurring, central technical and political challenge of Chinese governance in every era since imperial times.

"Both the 3,400-mile-long Yellow and the 3,915-mile-long Yangtze originated in the Tibetan plateau in the Himalayas. Beyond that their signature flows and environmental characteristics diverged sharply. The Yellow was shallow and by far the world's siltiest river - 30 times siltier than the Nile and nearly three times more than the famously muddy Colorado River. A dipperful of its water was commonly said to contain 70 percent mud. It was the rapid buildup of eroded silt from the loess plateaus that caused the Yellow to frequently overflow its banks in unpredictable, devastating floods across its lower plains. So many millions perished and lost their livelihoods in these fearsome floods over the centuries that the river became known as 'China's Sorrow.' Its greatest floods - some carving new paths as far as 500 miles away to the Yellow Sea - repeatedly fomented political and economic upheavals throughout Chinese history. Building tens of thousands of miles of levees to try to contain the Yellow within its banks, and rebuilding them after the inevitable failures, was thus always a top political priority of every Chinese dynasty.

"The huge Yangtze, by contrast, carried some 15 times more water than the Yellow, with deep navigable channels and many large tributaries that made it an ideal transport highway for large vessels once its waters had descended the mountains and wound its way through its deep canyons and gorges to enter its enormous lower basin and swampy delta. The Yangtze's seasonal monsoon floods regularly inundated the region; every half century or so, however, the combined rush of descending water and the engorged flow from its tributaries created giant waves that overwhelmed all man-made flood control infrastructure and resulted in devastating floods. When China's climate was moister in ancient times, the central section of the Yangtze had been a gigantic swamp, far too wet to sustain large-scale civilized human settlement.

"Gradual desiccation, and Chinese advances in water redirection, terracing, drainage, and other wet rice irrigation techniques gradually transformed the region into prosperous farmland. By medieval times it was producing the greater part of China's food, with rice surpluses distributed along its extensive tributary network and to the Yellow River region in the north via the Grand Canal and coastal sea routes. Political control of the 'golden waterway' of the Yangtze thus joined flood control as a vital linchpin of Chinese power. So closely correlated was river management and governing power that the very Chinese character for 'politics' is derived from root words meaning flood control."

delanceyplace.com 5/13/11 - orwell's rules for better writing

Fri, 13 May 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - George Orwell, in his famous 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," lamented the demise of the English language, in particular the lack of clarity in the expression of ideas. In it, he gave five brief examples of bad writing and five rules for better writing:

"Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

"Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. ... Here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written. These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder. Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)

3. On the one side we have free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as 'standard English.' When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens! Letter in Tribune

"[When trying to avoid these faults], one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

"These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article."

delanceyplace.com 5/12/11 - it was sex o'clock in america

Thu, 12 May 2011 00:10:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - for those who thought America's rebellious music and dance started with rock and roll in the 1950s, it was instead 50 years earlier, the music was ragtime, and as in 1950, the "Negro" was wrongly vilified:

"Ragtime might have been percolating throughout the black ghettos since the mid-1890s, but the style's first million-seller was achieved by Irving Berlin, with his 1911 hit 'Alexander's Ragtime Band.' It took a white man to really sell black music, as previously subterranean styles hit the mainstream as exploitable crazes. That was the deal: the new method of exchange.

"Ragtime's crossover success excited unfavorable comment, not the least because of its appeal to youth. The Musical American thought that ragtime was like an addictive drug. In 1913, the Musical Courier stated that America was 'falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro through the influence of what is popularly known as 'rag time' music.' This was nothing less than 'a national disaster,' as ragtime was 'symbolic of the primitive morality and perceptible moral limitations of the Negro type. With the latter sexual restraint is almost unknown, and the wildest latitude of moral uncertainty is conceded.'

"The link between music, race, and sexuality was confirmed in the moralists' eyes by the 'animal dances' that flooded the inner cities after the success of 'Alexander's Ragtime Band.' Beginning with the success of the turkey trot, a very fast and animated dance that evolved out of the nineteenth-century communal cakewalk, a whole bestiary erupted onto the nation's dance floors to the accompaniment of ragtime: dances like the bunny hug, the grizzly bear, the monkey glide, the possum trot, the kangaroo dip. As Irving Berlin noted in his 1911 hit, 'Everybody's doing it now.'

"In the animal dances, participants made up their moves as they went along. Instead of decorously holding each other at arm's length in the formality of the waltz and the polka, dancers whirled around the floor with their arms and legs intertwined. In the turkey trot, the lower half of the woman's body, from waist to knee, was enfolded in the legs of her male partner. The grizzly bear involved a total-body hug that went way beyond previous standards of propriety. This gliding and shimmying was an activity associated with burlesque performers and Negroes, not proper young whites. America's young didn't care. ...

"The craze went uptown. Life magazine reported in February 1912 that animal dances were flourishing 'above, below, and between. The dancing set in our town must be half a million strong.' ... Headlines like 'Movement Begins to Bar 'Turkey Trot' and 'Grizzly Bear' from Fifth Avenue' tapped into a wider panic about plummeting moral standards.

"This was summarized by a hysterical article in the August 1913 issue of Current Opinion, which seethed, 'It has struck Sex O'Clock in America: a wave of sex hysteria and sex discussion seems to have invaded this country.' Animal dances were associated with the increase in blatant prostitution and the prevalence of the white slave trade: the kidnapping and drugging of young girls for sexual purposes. ...

"The reformers and the authorities did their best to police the craze. Unable completely to close down the halls or to extirpate this dancing mania, they began to target the urban zones from which all this vice had originated. Just at the time when black American music was finding a greater national and international audience, red-light districts in San Francisco and St. Louis were segregated and then totally shut down.

"But it was too late as, in defiance of the reformers and the legislators, thousands of American youths continued to throng the dance halls every night of the week."

delanceyplace.com 5/11/11 - do women talk more than men?

Wed, 11 May 2011 03:48:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - there are some ideas that people are so ready to believe that they become widely held with little or no basis in data. One such item was the 2006 assertion by Louann Brizendine that women speak 20,000 words a day and men speak only 7,000:

"In 2006, Louann Brizendine published a book that tapped straight into readers' intellectual id. And no, 'intellectual id' is not an oxymoron. There are some things that people seem desperately eager to believe, and they're delighted to find those things 'confirmed' by a piece of scholarly-seeming work. Brizendine's The Female Brain was just such a hit.

"In the book Brizendine claimed, among other things, that women spoke 20,000 words a day, while men utter just 7,000. It was all part of her larger thesis that women's brains work differently from men's. And it was just what many people ... wanted to hear. The British Daily Mail wrote, 'It is something one half of the population has long suspected—and the other half always vocally denied.' A journalist blogging at The Washington Post wrote, 'Women talk too much, and men only think about sex ... you need a Ph.D. to figure that out?' (Brizendine has an M.D.) The claim was touted prominently on the book jacket and was an Internet sensation.

"Something didn't sound right to Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, though. Women speaking three times as much as men? Though his field is phonetics, Liberman also keeps a popular blog, Language Log, where he and about a dozen other linguists regularly post on general-interest language topics that crop up in the news.

"Had Brizendine done some new research? Or had Liberman missed some past research that found this huge disparity in men's and women's speech? He looked in the back of Brizendine's book—one-third of the text is footnotes, lending it a weighty air—and found only one reference for the 20,000-word claim: a self-help book called Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure, by Alan Pease and Allan Garner. Pease and Garner had not done any original fact-finding research on the subject themselves, nor did they cite anyone who had.

"Liberman dug around further. Had anybody else done the research on how much women and men talk? Sure enough, he found that they had. Unsurprisingly, there's a huge amount of variation in talkativeness. Some people, male or female, never shut up, and some rarely talk at all. But as for average differences between the sexes, Liberman found that studies found either no difference at all or a small one—in favor of men. Yes, according to some studies, men talk (on average) slightly more than women. Liberman has not yet found any study showing women talking significantly more, though he's asked his blog's readers to send him any, promising to publish the results. None has shown up.

"Confronted with this, Brizendine hedged. She claimed that the Pease and Garner self-help book in her footnotes was meant to be 'further reading,' not a scholarly citation. She claimed an unfair backlash against her ideas: 'It's very politically incorrect to say there are any gender differences.' She backtracked to say that women produced more 'communication events'—gestures, facial expressions, and whatnot—than men. But in the end she promised to take the bit about female logorrhea out of future editions of the book. Well she might. A study published in Science the next year, 2007, was the first to track a large number of people (210 women, 186 men) throughout the day in both the United States and Mexico. Both sexes used about 16,000 words a day, though on average, in this study, the women used 3.5 percent more words, a statistically trivial difference. Brizendine had said women talk 185 percent more than men.

"Of course, Brizendine's dud 'fact' was already out of the gate, racing around blogs and book reviews. As the book went into multiple translations, foreigners latched on as fast as English speakers have. ('Warum gebrauchen Frauen 20 000 Worter am Tag, wahrend Manner nur 7000?,' as Das Weibliche Gehirn's German publisher touted the claim on Germany's Amazon.de.) It is likely that, despite Liberman's efforts, it will become one of the early twenty-first century's favorite factoids, something that everyone 'knows.' "

delanceyplace.com 5/10/11 - saved by the salvation army

Tue, 10 May 2011 01:32:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Hal Needham, whose extraordinary Hollywood career encompassed 4,500 television episodes and 310 feature films as a stuntman, and then ten movies as director - including the iconic 70s movies Smoky and the Bandit and Hooper - was not yet ten years old and the child of a single mother when his life in rural Arkansas was saved by the Salvation Army. His experience was not untypical of rural America in the 1940s:

"During the winter the Salvation Army would bring a big truck of groceries and used clothing to town. Mom and I would stand in line to get a few pounds of beans, some lard, and a sack of flour. Best of all, they would give each child a piece of hard candy. I learned from experience not to bite into it, as it would be gone in no time. Instead, I would let it melt in my mouth to make it last longer. ...

"I don't know how we would have survived without the help of the Salvation Army. Not only did they give us food, they occasionally gave us used clothing. It didn't matter what size it was, someone in the family could wear it. If not, Mom would alter it so it fit ... kinda. I remember one time, Mom and I stood in line for an hour or more. It was bone-chilling cold, and I was shaking. After the lady behind the counter gave us our goodies and we started to leave, she said, 'Just a second,' and disappeared through a door. She returned with a coat and handed it to me. 'Try this on,' she told me. It was a bit too big but warm, and I grew into the coat before it wore out. I will never forget the tone of my mother's voice thanking her.

"Making a living and keeping food on the table were our priorities; education took a backseat. If and when we attended school, we had to walk about four miles. We went to school November through February, and sometimes into March, depending on the weather. Once winter broke we would plow, plant our crops, and cultivate them until the middle of July. We'd go back to school for a few weeks while the crops matured and then drop out again at harvest time. September and October we spent picking cotton, gathering berries, canning food, and cutting firewood for the winter. Before we knew it November had arrived and it was time to go back to school.

"My brother Armin and I were hired as the school janitors. Our job was to arrive at school an hour early, sweep the floor, carry in firewood, and build a fire in the potbelly stove. The money was good: $2.50 a month. But there was a problem. Many days our farm chores outweighed the necessity of going to school. But we still had to walk the eight miles to and from school to do our job, which made us change our minds about being janitors. ...

"Strange as it sounds, we looked forward to going back to school, because it was a lot easier than the work we had to do at home. I had one teacher who either really liked me or felt sorry for me because we were so poor. Many days at lunchtime she would give me part of her meal, saying it was more than she could eat. As I look back, I think she brought more than she needed, knowing I wouldn't turn down her offer. I later found out she had wanted to adopt me. Poor or not, my mom would have no part of it. I often wonder where I might have ended up if Mom had said yes.

"In 2004, a few months before my mom died at the age of ninety-seven, she told me that when she was pregnant with me, she knew her first marriage was coming to an end. One more mouth to feed would only add to her problems; maybe an abortion would be best. She lived in Memphis, Tennessee, at the time, and her downstairs neighbors talked her out of it, telling her, 'Edith, you never know. This might be the child that will always be there for you.' The neighbors' last name was Brett, so my mom named me Harold Brett Needham. I was happy to take care of her until the day she died."

delanceyplace.com 5/9/11 - the myth of microfinance

Mon, 09 May 2011 03:38:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - "microfinance" (or microcredit) - which is the lending of very small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in poverty-stricken countries around the world - has been increasingly lauded as a key to the advancement of these countries. In 2005, the popularity of microfinance reached fever pitch as it was designated the International Year of Microcredit by the United Nations, with endorsements from royalty, like Queen Rania of Jordan, and celebrities, like the actresses Natalie Portman and Aishwarya Pai. The ascendancy of microfinance reached its peak in 2oo6, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Professor Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi "inventor" of microcredit, and his Grameen Bank. The problem? Unless heavily subsidized, microfinance doesn't provide much beyond temporary, illusory benefit:

"The entrepreneurs in the informal [poor] sector, it is argued, are struggling not because they lack the necessary vision and skills but because they cannot get the money to realize their visions. The regular banks discriminate against them, while the local moneylenders charge prohibitive rates of interest. If they are given a small amount of credit (known as a 'microcredit') at a reasonable interest rate to set up a food stall, buy a mobile phone to rent out, or get some chickens to sell their eggs, they will be able to pull themselves out of poverty. With these small enterprises making up the bulk of the developing country's economy, their successes would translate into overall economic development.

The invention of microcredit is connnonly attributed to Muhammad Yunus, the economics professor who has been the public face of the microcredit industry since he set up the pioneering Grameen Bank in his native Bangladesh in 1983, although there were similar attempts before. Despite lending to poor people, especially poor women, who were traditionally considered to be high-risk cases, the Grameen Bank boasted a very high repayment ratio (95 per cent or more), showing that the poor are highly bankable. By the early 1990s, the success of the Grameen Bank, and of some similar banks in countries such as Bolivia, was noticed, and the idea of microcredit - or more broadly microfinance, which includes savings and insurance, and not just credit - spread fast.

The recipe sounds perfect. Microcredit allows the poor to get out of poverty through their own efforts, by providing them with the financial means to realize their entrepreneurial potential. In the process, they gain independence and self-respect, as they are no longer relying on handouts from the government and foreign aid agencies for their survival. Poor women are particularly empowered by microcredit, as it gives them the ability to earn an income and thus improve their bargaining positions vis-a-vis their male partners. Not having to subsidize the poor, the government feels less pressure on its budget. The wealth created in the process, naturally, makes the overall economy, and not just the informal sector entrepreneurs, richer. Given all this, it is not a surprise that Professor Yunus believes that, with the help of microfinance, we can create 'a poverty-free world [where the] only place you can see poverty is in the museum'. ...

"Unfortunately, the hype about microfinance is, well, just that - hype. There are growing criticisms of microfinance, even by some of its early 'priests'. For example, in a recent paper with David Roodman, Jonathan Morduch, a long-time advocate of microfinance, confesses that '[s]trikingly, 30 years into the microfinance movement we have little solid evidence that it improves the lives of clients in measurable ways'. The problems are too numerous even to list here; anyone who is interested can read the fascinating recent book by Milford Bateman, Why Doesn't Microfinance Work? But those most relevant to our discussion are as follows.

"The microfinance industry has always boasted that its operations remain profitable without government subsidies or contributions from international donors, except perhaps in the initial teething phase. Some have used this as evidence that the poor are as good at playing the market as anyone else, if you will just let them. However, it turns out that, without subsidies from governments or international donors, microfinance institutions have to charge, and have been charging, near-usurious rates. It has been revealed that the Grameen Bank could initially charge reasonable interest rates only because of the (hushed-up) subsidies it was getting from the Bangladeshi government and international donors. If they are not subsidized, microfinance institutions have to charge interest rates of typically 40-50 per cent for their loans, with rates as high as 80-100 per cent in countries such as Mexico. When, in the late 1990s, it came under pressure to give up the subsidies, the Grameen Bank had to relaunch itself (in 2001) and start charging interest rates of 49-50 per cent.

"With interest rates running up to 100 per cent, few businesses can make the necessary profits to repay the loans, so most of the loans made by microfinance institutions (in some cases as high as 90 per cent) have been used for the purpose of 'consumption smoothing' - people taking out loans to pay for their daughter's wedding or to make up for a temporary fall in income due to the illness of a working family member. In other words, the vast bulk of microcredit is not used to fuel entrepreneurship by the poor, the alleged goal of the exercise, but to finance consumption."

delanceyplace.com 5/6/11 - theater acting vs movie acting

Fri, 06 May 2011 03:26:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Michael Caine, the Oscar-winning veteran of over one hundred feature films, has a reputation for professionalism and exhaustive preparation - all, he claims, so that he can overcome his natural fear and tension and come across as natural in his work. In fact, he goes so far as to describe relaxation as key for great acting. Here he contrasts theater acting with movie acting:

delanceyplace.com 5/5/11 - "there is no second chance, not for most of us"

Thu, 05 May 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - in the ominous and tumultuous years before World War I, playwright J.M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan, which he based on the Llewelyn Davies family and their young son Peter. Unlike the benign Walt Disney version of 1953, in the heartbreaking original work, the Darling children are separated from their parents for years, and Pan himself can never return home:

"The first few years of the twentieth century were far from being the perennial golden summer of folk memory, as the imperial European countries expanded their global influence to the point of irreversible conflict. In Britain, Victorian certainties were undermined by the Boer War and presentiments of the greater war to come, while at the same time challenged by the movements for women's suffrage, trade union rights, and the domestic response to European modernism. ...

"War and death lay beneath the ordered Edwardian surface, if only in a quickening, irrational impulse. Nowhere is this clearer than in Peter Pan, which, first staged in December 1904, has become a twentieth-century archetype. Like its American contemporary, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan was a story aimed at children but adults were hooked in by its deep psychological complexity. It continues to speak so effectively across the generations that it is easy to forget its origins in a particular time, place, and biography. ...

"When J. M. Barrie met the Llewelyn Davies family in 1897, Barrie was already well established, but, beneath the successful facade, he was tormented by doubts and morbid fears. Undersized, haunted by the childhood loss of his brother David, locked into a marriage that he referred to as a 'horrid nightmare,' Barrie had lost his mother and sister in 1896. During the long walks that he took in Kensington Gardens, he began to turn to other people's children for solace. This was not only a substitute for parenthood but a reflection of his own self-diagnosed dilemma: 'He was a boy who could not grow up.' ...

"Within a year of first meeting the Llewelyn Davies family, he began working on a children's story about the birdlike attributes of babies in general and younger brother Peter in particular. Taking an idea from a contemporary play, he conceived of a character named Peter Pan who escapes from the nursery and attempts to live as a bird. Having cut himself off from human society - 'a Betwixt-and-Between' - he becomes an outlaw. When he tries to return to his bedroom, the windows are barred: 'There is no second chance, not for most of us.'

"The idea was further developed in the 1902 novel The Little White Bird, where Peter Pan appears as a major subplot. After its success, Barrie set about expanding the character into a full 'fairy play': a hasty first draft was finished by April 1904, and rehearsals began six months later. When it opened on December 27, Peter Pan was an immediate success with both adults and children. Daphnedu Maurier later wrote about her father Gerald's performance as the male lead, 'When Hook first paced his quarter deck in the year of 1904, children were carried screaming from the stalls.'

"Only one critic, Max Beerbohm, noticed the all-too-complete conflation of the adult with the child: 'Mr. Barrie has never grown up. He is still a child absolutely.' On the surface, Peter Pan is a play for children: like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it demands a suspension of adult skepticism and linear thinking, and plays upon the archetypal fears of being lost and orphaned. But if Oz is benign and forward-looking - full of the optimism of a new continent - Peter Pan is haunted and haunting: if, for Dorothy and the Darling children there is no place like home, then for Peter there is no home."

delanceyplace.com 5/4/11 - god help you if there is no one to reach out to

Wed, 04 May 2011 03:30:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - after years of planning and months of agonizing preparation, Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe had the smash hit of 1956 on their hands—My Fair Lady—the biggest hit in the history of Broadway up to that point. As the curtain fell, Lerner, who had written the book and lyrics for the show, had something unexpected to deal with, enormous success:

"At the end of 'The Rain in Spain,' the applause exploded like nuclear fission. Walking down the side aisles of the theatre, I saw almost a thousand faces with eyes sparkling with tears, smiling as if it were a contest and applauding like cymbals. I walked to the back of the theatre and stopped pacing. When the final curtain fell, the members of the audience rose from their seats and surged forward down the aisles, crying 'Bravo,' and applauding with their hands over their heads. There was curtain call after curtain call.

"It was so overwhelming that I felt lonely. I rushed backstage to [lead actor and star] Rex Harrison's dressing room. The first person I saw en route was Marlene Dietrich who was all in white from top to toe, her face covered in white powder. She embraced me so forcefully that when we separated her face had the normal skin tones and I had the powder. I went around to see everyone to thank them and congratulate them. The stage was filled with members of the audience who were, in some way, connected the people in the cast. I cannot recall what anybody said to me, nor can I even remember my own feelings. It was too far beyond any experience that I could have been prepared for.

"There was no opening night party, and had there been one I would not have gone. I have always avoided them out of self-preservation. One is so easily fooled by opening night applause that every opening night party is high on hopes alone before the first drink is served, and the higher the expectations the shorter they fall. Nothing is more painful than a New Year's Eve atmosphere that comes to an abrupt halt when the first reviews come in and they are bad. To me it is difficult enough to live through an opening night without having to be a good sport afterwards. So I usually sequester myself in some small room with a small group of steadfast chums who will love me in December as they did in May.

"On this opening night I had taken a small room at '21' to which, along with my civilian chums, came Moss and Kitty [Hart], Rex, the Liebersons and Irene Selznlck. [My songwriting partner] Fritz, having not a doubt in the world of the outcome, followed the tradition and went to Sardi's for the standing ovation. The reviews were idyllic, but Rex was Rex to the very end and flew into a blinding rage (which, of course, passed quickly) because he felt the New York Times had not given me my due.

"By two in the morning I was numb. Not from alcohol—I could not have gotten drunk on a case of brandy. All I knew was that when we separated everyone seemed blissfully happy, and I reacted more to their happiness than to the reviews.

"By the time I arrived home I was calm and very tired, but I clearly remember one thought that crowded my mind—or was it a feeling? When I fail I withdraw into myself in search of some place to keep warm. A triumph, as I was fortunate enough to have that night, is quite a different matter. You cannot hide and so you instinctively reach out. If one is alone, one can survive a failure reasonably intact: but success steals your defenses and leaves you on top of the world, stark naked. When you reach out, God help you if there is no one there to reach out to."

delanceyplace.com 5/3/11 - the saltpetre trade

Tue, 03 May 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the English East India Company, locked out of the lucrative spice trade by the Dutch during the 17th century, turned to India and its saltpetre, the indispensable ingredient of gunpowder. This new business fueled its profitability and helped fuel the rise of England. Some historians have noted that England and Europe experienced significantly more war than other continents during this period, and some have attributed this to the odd geography of Europe, where a predominance of peninsulas has long made it difficult to unify the continent. Whatever the reason, gunpowder was a superb business to be in during the 17th and 18th centuries:

"Spices would no longer be the primary goal of the [English East India Company] - access to cheap spices direct from the source was controlled by the [Dutch], whereas India offered new and valuable commodities such as silks, indigo dye, cotton textiles and saltpetre, the vital ingredient in gunpowder that was in perpetual short supply in Europe and would drive the company's fortunes for over a century. ...

"Saltpetre - crystals formed in the earth from bacterial action on animal dung and urine, with the assistance of heat - formed with particular vigour in the sewage-sodden soils of the agricultural heartland of Bengal, around Calcutta, where the extraordinary heat and prolonged dry season produced great quantities of the highest quality. 'East India,' according to one seventeenth-century merchant, 'gloryeth as much in this salt-petre as in its spices.' By the end of the seventeenth century India was the primary source of supply for almost all of Europe, and by the eighteenth century many European companies had agents, warehouses and social or commercial relationships with the various saltpetre producers in India. ...

"Indian saltpetre to a large extent fuelled most of the European wars from the mid-seventeenth century through the eighteenth century. In Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600 - 1800, Holden Furber writes that throughout the second half of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century the English East India Company's 'sales, with their steadily rising receipts from Bengal sattpetre, reflected an ever more warlike Europe.' The historian Jagadish Narayan Sarkar comments in the Indian Historical Quarterly that 'saltpetre was so much in demand in England that there was a standing order from the Company's authorities there for an annual supply.' In spite of the wild price fluctuations for saltpetre (depending on the state of war), the English and Dutch companies reaped vast profits from their mercantile activities and paid huge dividends to their shareholders and taxes to their respective governments....

"[By 1744], the English East India Company had thrived such that it had surpassed the Portuguese and was soon to eclipse the Dutch East India Company as well. ... The second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century saw a continuous series of conflicts in Europe involving Sweden, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the Holy Roman Empire, Russia, Poland and the Ottoman Empire in an endlessly shifting round of alliances. Scarcely a handful of years passed when a war was not being fought somewhere on the continent."

delanceyplace.com 5/2/11 - the mansions of kings and queens

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:21:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the mansions and retinues of such kings and queens as Britain's King Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth:

"Traditionally, the great house builders (and house accumulators) were monarchs. At the time of his death Henry VIII had no fewer than forty-two palaces. But his daughter Elizabeth cannily saw that it was much cheaper to visit others and let them absorb the costs of her travels, so she resurrected in a big way the venerable practice of making annual royal progresses [lengthy visits to the houses of nobles]. The queen was not in truth a great traveler—she never left England or even ventured very far within it—but she was a terrific visitor. Her annual progresses lasted eight to twelve weeks and took in about two dozen houses.

"Royal progresses were nearly always greeted with a mixture of excitement and dread by those on whom the monarch called. On the one hand they provided unrivaled opportunities for preferment and social advancement, but on the other they were stupefyingly expensive. The royal household numbered up to about 1,500 people, and a good many of these—150 or so in the case of Elizabeth I—traveled with the royal personage on her annual pilgrimages. Hosts not only had the towering expenditure of feeding, housing, and entertaining an army of spoiled and privileged people but also could expect to experience quite a lot of pilfering and property damage, as well as some less salubrious surprises. After the court of Charles II departed from Oxford in about 1660, one of those left behind remarked in an understandably appalled tone how the royal visitors had left 'their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars.'

"Even her most long-standing ministers learned to be hypersensitive to the queen's pleasures. When Elizabeth complained of the distance to his country house in Lincolnshire, Lord Burghley bought and extended another at Waltham Cross, in London's Home Counties. Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth's lord chancellor, built a mighty edifice called Holdenby House expressly for receiving the queen. In the event, she never came, and Hatton died £18,000 in debt—a crushing burden, equivalent to about £9 million today.

"The worst imposition of all was to be instructed to take on some costly, long-standing obligation to the crown. Such was the fate of Bess of Hardwick's husband, the sixth Lord Shrewsbury. For sixteen years he was required to act as jailer to Mary, Queen of Scots, which in effect meant maintaining the court of a small, fantastically disloyal state in his own home. We can only imagine his sinking heart as he saw a line of eighty horse-drawn wagons—enough to make a procession a third of a mile long—coming up his drive bearing the Scottish queen, fifty servants and secretaries, and all their possessions. In addition to housing and feeding this force of people, Shrewsbury had to maintain a private army to provide security."

delanceyplace.com 4/29/11 - led zeppelin and stairway to heaven

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:14:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Led Zeppelin was a band formed in 1968 by Jimmy Page and called the New Yardbirds - until The Who's Keith Moon and John Entwistle started kidding Page about starting a group with him, joking, "We've got a good name for it. Let's call it Lead Zeppelin, 'cause it'll go over like a lead balloon." Page took the name and dropped the "a" to avoid mispronunciation. Though reviled by critics (a Life Magazine writer reported upon meeting the group that she "got to smell the sh*t firsthand"), Led Zeppelin was already the highest-grossing band in the world and had released three chart-topping albums when lead singer Robert Plant stared into a mansion fireplace and tried to fashion lyrics to describe spiritual perfection:

"[As they worked on their fourth album], 'Misty Mountain Hop' was written at the Headley Grange [a mansion used as their recording studio]. So was 'The Battle of Evermore' and three others. And then there was 'Stairway to Heaven.' Robert improvised most of the lyrics for "Stairway" during the rehearsals as he sat in front of the roaring fireplace, looking for some way, he said, to describe spiritual perfection. Jimmy listened and was just blown away by what he heard.

"From the beginning, he felt that this song could be something special, that Robert had eclipsed everything that he had written before. Late at night by himself, Page worked on molding 'Stairway' into a cohesive unit, using the Telecaster and building guitar track upon guitar track until he had the powerful instrumental harmonies he wanted. He recorded three different guitar solos, none of them similar, and finally chose the one he thought was best after agonizing over them in the studio late one night. ...

"The recording of the fourth album was completed in February 1971. As it was being prepared for release, there was some talk of calling it Led Zeppelin IV. But Jimmy was against it. He was still pissed at the critics, and perhaps as a way of retaliating against or confusing them, he didn't want the album to have a title at all. He didn't even want Led Zeppelin's name or the album's catalog number anywhere on it.

" 'The music is what matters,' Jimmy argued. 'Let people buy it because they like the music. I don't want any writing on the cover! Period!'

"Executives at Atlantic Records were outraged at Jimmy's demand. 'An album without a title!' they exclaimed. 'An album without the artists' name on it! You guys are signing your own death warrant!'

"Still, the band wouldn't capitulate. As a last-ditch effort, Atlantic tried to convince them to at least put 'Led Zeppelin' on the spine of the album. Zeppelin refused. ...

"Throughout Europe, audiences responded almost deliriously to 'Stairway to Heaven.' When the band performed at KB-Hallen in Copenhagen, the fourth Zeppelin album was still months away from its release. But judging by the audience frenzy that night as Robert guided the crowd through 'Stairway' 's compelling journey, you might have thought that the song had been at the top of the charts for weeks. Word of mouth had obviously created a lot of enthusiasm about the tune. And when Plant introduced it as 'something of an epic' and Jimmy gave it a distinguished touch on his red Gibson SG double-neck guitar, the performance of this single song clearly turned into an event.

" 'I bet there are a hundred tape recorders out there tonight trying to get 'Stairway to Heaven' on tape,' band manager Peter Grant said backstage. 'The bootleggers are going to make a killing on this one.'

"At the end of the show, Jimmy just shook his head. 'We've got a real monster on our hands,' he said, intoxicated by the audience response to 'Stairway to Heaven.' 'It's one of those songs that is developing a life of its own,' he said. Pagey knew that every musician waits for a song like this. Zeppelin had finally created one."

delanceyplace.com 4/28/11 - matthias ringmann gave america its name

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:19:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - in 1507, a German scholar named Matthias Ringmann gave the New World a name - America. Inspired by the still-fresh discovery of the New World, he was part of a small band of German humanist scholars in Saint-Die, Alsace, who decided to make a new world map with accompanying commentary to be sold and studied throughout the cities and universities of Europe. They considered the New World to be the "fourth part" of the world, after Europe, Asia, and Africa, and from their distant outpost believed that Columbus had merely discovered islands west of the Canaries, and the true discoverer of this massive new continent was Amerigo Vespucci:

"[Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemuller and their colleagues] decided to produce a geographical package consisting of three parts: a huge new map of the whole world, dedicated to Maximilian I (the Holy Roman Emperor and thus the symbolic head of the Germanic people), that would sum up ancient and modern geographical learning; a tiny version of that map, printed as a series of globe gores that could be pasted onto a small ball, creating the world's first mass-produced globe; and a sort of users' guide to those two maps, titled Introduction to Cosmography. ... It was a profound moment in the history of cartography - and in the larger history of ideas. ...

"The bulk of the work - the design of the map and the globe, and the writing of the Introduction to Cosmography - fell to Waldseemuller and Ringmann. Ringmann took the lead in writing the book. Libraries today credit Waldseemuller as the author, but the book actually names no author, and Ringmann's fingerprints appear all over it. ... Ringmann the writer, Waldseemuller the mapmaker. ...

"Why dwell on this question of authorship? Because whoever wrote the Introduction to Cosmography almost certainly coined the name America (which would have been pronounced 'Amer-eeka'). Here, too, the balance tilts in Ringmann's favor. Consider the famous passage in which the author steps forward to explain and justify the use of the name.

" 'These parts have in fact now been more widely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard in what follows). Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this [new part] from being called Amerigen - the land of Amerigo, as it were - or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character.'

"This sounds a lot like Ringmann, who is known to have spent time mulling over the reasons that concepts and places so often had the names of women. 'Why are all the virtues, the intellectual qualities, and the sciences always symbolized as if they belonged to the feminine sex?' he would write in a 1511 essay on the Muses. 'Where does this custom spring from - a usage common not only to the pagan writers but also to the scholars of the church? It originated from the belief that knowledge is destined to be fertile of good works. ... Even the three parts of the old world received the name of women.'

"The naming-of-America passage reveals Ringmann's hand in other ways, too. In his poetry and prose Ringmann regularly amused himself by making up words, by punning in different languages, and by investing his writing with hidden meanings for his literary friends to find and savor. The passage is rich in just this sort of wordplay, much of which requires a familiarity with Greek, a language Waldseemuller didn't know.

"The key to the passage, almost always ignored or overlooked, is the curious name Amerigen - a coinage that involves just the kind of multifaceted, multilingual punning that Ringmann frequently indulged in. The word combines Amerigo with gen, a form of the Greek word for 'earth,' creating the meaning that the author goes on to propose - 'the land of Amerigo.' But the word yields other meanings, too. Gen can also mean 'born' in Greek, and the word ameros can mean "new," making it possible to read Amerigen as not only 'land of Amerigo' but also 'born new' - a double entendre that would have delighted Ringmann, and one that very nicely complements the idea of fertility that he associated with female names. The name may also contain a play on meros, a Greek word that can sometimes be translated as 'place.' Here Amerigen becomes A-meri-gen, or 'No-place-land': not a bad way to describe a previously unnamed continent whose geography is still uncertain."

delanceyplace.com 4/27/11 - our revolution started because of land more than tea

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:11:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - before the American Revolution, one of the biggest businesses in Virginia, Pennsylvania and other colonies was land speculation and development - it was comparable in its importance and prestige to that of energy businesses in the twentieth century and internet businesses in the twenty-first. So when London tried to prop up the near-bankrupt finances of the East India Company by granting it a monopoly on tea, one belligerent colony - Massachusetts - staged a "tea party," but the vested interests of other colonies caused them to continue look for ways to reconcile with Britain. Then the Scotsman Lord Dunsmore, the Crown's appointed governor of Virginia, acted ill-advisedly to invalidate the claims of George Washington and others to the land they had worked strenuously to acquire in the west, and the Revolution began:

"As colonel of the regiment [during the 1763 French and Indian War, George] Washington was entitled to claim 20,000 acres of land on the south bank of the Ohio, or 10 percent of the 200,000 acres the House of Burgesses had reserved for the veterans. He supplemented this handsome reward by buying up the land warrants of scores of his fellow veterans, eventually realizing the rights to an additional 25,000 acres. From September 1767 he employed an old subordinate from the Virginia Regiment, Captain William Crawford, to identify tracts on the Ohio that he might acquire when the land grants were finally made. ... [Washington, along with many others, continued to actively acquire land in Pennsyvania and what is now Ohio and Kentucky.] ...

"[Because Virginia governor Lord Dunsmore initially acted to support the colonist's land speculation], it should not surprise us that Washington remained in contact with the governor through the spring of 1775, even after he had served as a delegate to the First Continental Congress and even as he was preparing to depart for Philadelphia as a delegate to the Second. His fellow delegates in the two Virginia conventions chose him for these assignments
precisely because he was not a firebrand like Patrick Henry or an impassioned writer like Thomas Jefferson but rather a moderate man, known more for the sobriety of his views than for his readiness to make a public issue of them.

"From late summer 1774 through the spring of 1775, Washington continued to look for accommodation. On one hand, he believed that Parliament's measures [such as the Stamp Act and the Coercive Acts] were 'not only repugnant to natural right, but subversive of the law and constitution of Great Britain itself'; on the other, he supported the campaign against the Shawnees [to enable additional land acquisition], kept up friendly relations with the royal governor who promoted it, and nursed the hope that the king and Parliament would back down from their position in Massachusetts and restore a sensible balance in imperial governance. Only in retrospect did it appear that those beliefs and actions were self-contradictory.

"It took a series of events in the spring of 1775 to destroy Washington's hope that harmony could be restored without the loss of colonial rights. The first development was the rumor that Dunmore had disallowed the surveys that William Crawford had made on Washington's behalf in the Ohio country on the grounds that Crawford was not properly licensed as a Virginia surveyor. Astonished, Washington wrote to the governor on April 3 to ask if this 'altogether incredible' information could possibly be accurate. His Lordship's curt reply, dated April 18, did nothing to dispel his fears; on the contrary, Dunmore essentially confirmed the rumor.

"That the governor would casually invalidate years of effort and expense mystified Washington as much as it offended him. Was this a reprisal for his participation in the two Virginia conventions and the Continental Congress? An attempt to bully him into taking sides against his fellow planters? Or was it an effort to snatch away lands that he had already surveyed and on which he had begun to seat settlers, in order to bestow them on the governor's supporters? Washington had no way to know, but when word of a second incident arrived shortly after, he found it impossible to believe that the mercurial Scot was up to anything but mischief."

delanceyplace.com 4/26/11 - 9,380 congressman

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:01:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - if we were strictly following both the letter of the U.S. Constitution and the intentions of those who wrote it, we would now have 9,380 members of the House of Representatives. That is because the Constitution speaks of one representative for every thirty thousand citizens to insure a direct and personal connection between congressmen and their constituents - in order to achieve truly democratic involvement. This point was so important to George Washington that he required a change from forty thousand down to thirty thousand on the last day of the Constitutional Convention:

"The minimal size of a House district was reduced from 40,000 to 30,000 on the very last day of the Convention, and only then with an unprecedented direct endorsement from George Washington, speaking from the chair, who rightly foresaw that many Americans would be disturbed by the large number of constituents each member of the House would represent. No constitutional requirement limits the size of the House to 435 representatives (as set in 1911), which makes it a smaller body than the British House of Commons. (Rakove) ...

"Based on the count in 2ooo of America's population, 9,380 is the number of representatives Congress would be permitted to create. The apportionment following the 2ooo census left each House member representing an average of 646,952 people. The current size of the House, 435 seats, dates to a 1911 law that authorized 433 representatives, with room for two more when Arizona and New Mexico were admitted as states. The House eventually swelled to 437 seats with the additions of Alaska and Hawaii but was adjusted back to 435. ...

"The first House of Representatives was to include as many as sixty-five members. Madison urged that the number be doubled, as it 'was too small a number to represent the whole inhabitants of the United States; They would not possess enough of the confidence of the people, and would be too sparsely taken from the people, to bring with them all the local information which would be frequently wanted.' Others called for fewer members, with Roger Sherman of Connecticut urging fifty on the grounds that 'the great distance they will have to travel will render their attendance precarious and will make it difficult to prevail on a sufficient number of fit men to undertake the service.' After the first apportionment, which followed the 1790 census, the House was expanded to 105 seats, with each seat representing about 33,000 inhabitants as counted for apportionment purposes. (Lipsky)"

delanceyplace.com 4/25/11 - why some people are creative

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:18:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - many highly creative people behave in ways that are viewed as eccentric. Why? Researchers are finding that their creativity and their eccentricity are rooted in the same cause - a diminished ability to filter out nearly as much of the constant stream of information as the average person, and thus the need to process and organize this information in untypical ways. The term for this trait is "cognitive disinhibition":

"Many highly creative people [display] personal behavior [that] sometimes strikes others as odd. Albert Einstein picked up cigarette butts off the street to get tobacco for his pipe; Howard Hughes spent entire days on a chair in the middle of the supposedly germ-free zone of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite; the composer Robert Schumann believed that his musical compositions were dictated to him by Beethoven and other deceased luminaries from their tombs; and Charles Dickens is said to have fended off imaginary urchins with his umbrella as he walked the streets of London. ...

"In fact, creativity and eccentricity often go hand in hand, and researchers now believe that both traits may be a result of how the brain filters incoming information. Even in the business world, there is a growing appreciation of the link between creative thinking and unconventional behavior, with increased acceptance of the latter. ...

"In the past few decades psychologists and other scientists have explored the connection using empirically validated measures of both creativity and eccentricity. To measure creativity, researchers may look at an individual's record of creative achievements, his or her involvement in creative activities or ability to think creatively (for example, to come up with new uses for ordinary household items). To measure eccentricity, researchers often use scales that assess schizotypal personality. ... Schizotypal personality is a milder version of the clinical psychiatric condition called schizotypal personality disorder, which is among a cluster of personality disorders labeled 'odd or eccentric' in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. ... Not all schizotypal people have a personality disorder, however. They are often very high functioning, talented and intelligent. Many of my students at Harvard University, for example, score far above average on schizotypal scales, as well as on creativity and intelligence measures. ...

"My research suggests that these manifestations of schizotypal personality in and of themselves do not promote creativity; certain cognitive mechanisms that may underlie eccentricity could also promote creative thinking, however. In my model of how creativity and eccentricity are related, I theorize that one of these underlying mechanisms is a propensity for cognitive disinhibition. ...

"Cognitive disinhibition is the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival. We are all equipped with mental filters that hide most of the processing that goes on in our brains behind the scenes. So many signals come in through our sensory organs, for example, that if we paid attention to all of them we would be overwhelmed. Furthermore, our brains are constantly accessing imagery and memories stored in our mental files to process and decode incoming information. Thanks to cognitive filters, most of this input never reaches conscious awareness. There are individual differences in how much information we block out, however; both schizotypal and schizophrenic individuals have been shown to have reduced functioning of one of these cognitive filters, called latent inhibition (LI). Reduced LI appears to increase the amount of unfiltered stimuli reaching our conscious awareness and is associated with offbeat thoughts and hallucinations. ...

"Reduced cognitive filtering could explain the tendency of highly creative people to focus intensely on the content of their inner world at the expense of social or even self-care needs. (Beethoven, for example, had difficulty tending to his own cleanliness.) When conscious awareness is overpopulated with unusual and unfiltered stimuli, it is difficult not to focus attention on that inner universe. In 2003 my colleague Jordan Peterson and I reported [that] ... we think that the reduction in cognitive inhibition allows more material into conscious awareness that can then be reprocessed and recombined in novel and original ways, resulting in creative ideas. ...

"A brain-imaging study, done in 2010 by investigators at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, suggests the propensity for both creative insights and schizotypal experiences may result from a specific configuration of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. Using positron-emission tomography, Örjan de Manzano, Fredrik Ullén and their colleagues examined the density of dopamine D2 receptors in the subcortical region of the thalamus in 14 subjects who were tested for divergent-thinking skills. The results indicate that thalamic D2 receptor densities are diminished in subjects with high divergent-thinking abilities, similar to patterns found in schizophrenic subjects in previous studies. The researchers believe that reduced dopamine binding in the thalamus, found in both creative and schizophrenic subjects, may decrease cognitive filtering and allow more information into conscious awareness.

"Clearly, however, not all eccentric individuals are creative. Work from our lab indicates that other cognitive factors, such as high IQ and high working memory capacity, enable some people to process and mentally manipulate extra information without being overwhelmed by it. Through a series of studies, we have, in fact, shown that a combination of lower cognitive inhibition and higher IQ is associated with higher scores on a variety of creativity measures. The shared vulnerability model suggests that at least a subgroup of highly creative individuals may share some (but not all) biological vulnerability factors with individuals who suffer from psychotic illnesses, such as schizophrenia. This vulnerability may allow the highly creative person access to ideas and thoughts that are inaccessible to those of us with less porous mental filters."

delanceyplace.com 4/22/11 - steve martin quits stand-up

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:12:00 -0400

"Martin looked enviously at the relatively stable world of movies. He took a single nonsense line from his stand-up—'I was born a poor black child'—and built it into a screenplay, about the imbecilic adopted son of poor black sharecroppers who tries to make his way in the world. The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner, and released in December 1979, made a surprising forty-three million dollars at the box office and opened the door to his film career. 'I knew that while I was hot, I had better switch to something,' Martin says. 'I had no intention of turning over my act and getting a new act. I knew it was over when it was over. And I thought, now's the time. I'm hot enough to make a deal. You're on a train and it's going one way and another train passes and it's going another way, you gotta leap onto that other train when your paths are crossing.' Martin fulfilled the last of his road engagements and released one more less-successful album, The Steve Martin Brothers, in 1981. Then he quit stand-up for good."

delanceyplace.com 4/21/11 - children kidnapped by indians

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:09:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - many children such as Jeff Smith were captured by the Native Americans in the mid-1800s, and though heartbroken, most were treated well. Most were returned as adults, where they faced the struggle of adjusting to a way of life they had forgotten, and the second heartbreak of having lost their Native American friends and a way of life they loved:

"Eventually, most of the captured children were sent back to their families, often against their will. Usually, a federal Indian agent, working together with a friendly Indian chief, arranged their release. But the redeemed captives found it much harder to readjust to their own people's ways than it had been to adapt to Indian society. Jeff Smith put it best: 'Everything seemed mighty tame after I got back home.'

"As adults, many of the former child captives lived in limbo between their original and adoptive cultures. A number of common characteristics set them apart. They were often reserved and did not talk much. ... A journalist who interviewed Jeff Smith noted, 'It took a three year acquaintance with him to induce him to say anything.' Adolph Korn's stepsister recalled: 'Always restless, he would sometimes take up his gun, leave home and be gone for days in the woods. When he came back he said little about where he had been.'

"When [Herman] Lehmann's mother made him attend school after he returned home, he threatened to tear down all the lattice in the schoolhouse so he could see out. His teacher wrote, 'As one in prison, he pined for the companionship of his lndian friends, and their manner of life.' Most of the former boy captives eventually became cowboys and worked the great cattle drives of the 1870s and 1880s. 'We couldn't content ourselves to stay indoors, and naturally went to working cattle,' explained Jeff Smith. Like the plains Indians, they could not settle in one place. Bianca Babb's grandson recalled: 'Grandmother had the Indian travel fever in her, because she was always buying a new house and moving. She said a person gets tired of looking at the same old thing all the time.' ...

"The former captives held fast to many of their Indian customs and teachings. One man reminisced that whenever Jeff Smith came to visit, he always slept outside under a big tree: 'Sometimes, if it was raining or real cold, he would come indoors, but even then, he would sleep on the hard floor with only his blanket. He didn't like to sit at the table to eat, choosing instead to sit 'Indian style,' eating in the corner or outdoors.'

"They were tougher than the average person and had no use for luxuries. Lehmann's hands were so hardened that he could grab a coal out of a fire and use it to light a cigarette, When Jeff Smith talked about his trail-driving days, he pointed out: 'As far as I was concerned, the usual occurrences that sometimes upset the other boys in the outfit had no weight with me. I had gone through so many worse things that they were scarcely noticeable.' ...

"A number of former captives could not hold a regular job and were never very successful financially. They resented any type of work that tied them down, such as farming or routine manual labor. The former boy captives thought those sorts of jobs were undignified. Some were too generous for their own good, giving away everything they had to anyone they liked, The Indians had taught them that wealth should be shared and enjoyed in the present, not hoarded or put away for the future."

delanceyplace.com 4/20/11 - entangling alliances with none

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:24:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the foreign policy expressed by America's founding fathers was one of goodwill, peace, and "little connexion" - even though the nation was torn in a maelstrom of passions between those who favored strong alliances with France and those who instead favored strong alliances with France's arch-enemy, England. This posture was codified in George Washington's 1796 farewell address when he said "Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all," and that "nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The Nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave." Washington emphatically added that "The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible." Thomas Jefferson famously argued in his 1801 inaugural address for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none."

In contrast to that view is the idea that America should intervene in the affairs of others as needed, and has the mission of saving the world. That idea is rooted not in the writings of the founding fathers, but instead in the writings and sermons of the Puritans 150 years earlier, who viewed American Indians as wanting them to "come over and help us" and who believed they were a "city on a hill." As Author Sarah Vowell puts it in describing the English Puritans who arrived in 1630 to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony:

"The most important reason I am concentrating on John Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s is that [America] is [still] haunted by the Puritans' vision of themselves as God's chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire. The most obvious and influential example of that mind-set is Winthrop's sermon 'A Model of Christian Charity,' in which he calls on New England to be 'as a city upon a hill.' The most ironic and entertaining example of that mind-set is the Massachusetts Bay Colony's official seal. The seal, which the Winthrop fleet brought with them from England, pictures an Indian in a loincloth holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. Words are coming out of his mouth. The Indian says, "Come over and help us."

"That is really what it says.

"The worldview behind that motto - we're here to help, whether you want our help or not - is the Massachusetts Puritans' most enduring bequest to the future United States. And like everything the Puritans believed, it is derived from Scripture. In Acts, chapter 16, one night the Apostle Paul has a vision. In the vision, a Macedonian man appears and tells him, 'Come over into Macedonia, and help us.' So Paul heads west.

"So westward sails the Arbella in 163o. And then one night almost three centuries later President William McKinley will pray to God and God will tell him to help the Filipinos by Christianizing them (even though they have been Catholics for two hundred years), 'and the next morning,' he says, 'I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our mapmaker) and told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States.' So westward sail the gunboats toward Manila Bay. And then in the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy, believing that the United States must 'bear the burden ... of helping freedom defend itself,' invades Vietnam; otherwise, he explains, 'if we stop helping them, they will become ripe for internal subversion and a Communist takeover.' So westward sail the aircraft carriers toward Saigon Harbor. And then, because the U.S. will keep on going west to help people until we're going east, the warships and the F-17 stealth fighters hurry toward the Persian Gulf. On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush announced that 'American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.' Five days earlier, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press and his words redrew the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, replacing the Indian with a citizen of Baghdad, begging, 'Come over and help us.' Of the American invasion, Cheney claimed, 'My belief is that we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.' After all, we're there to help.

"In the present-day United States, the Massachusetts Puritans' laughable, naive, and self-aggrandizing idea that they were leaving England partly to come over and help American Indians who were simply begging for their assistance has won out over the Founding Fathers' philosophy of not firing shots in other countries' wars. In his 1801 inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson argued for 'peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none.' "

delanceyplace.com 4/19/11 - The precision and clarity of Latin

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - certain grammatical "rules" that are widely viewed as correct come from the invalid application of grammatical rules from Classical Latin and Greek to the English language by British authors writing hundreds of years ago. Two such "rules"—which have been beautifully and routinely violated by writers from Shakespeare to Hemingway—are the prohibitions against split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition:

"The split-infinitive rule may represent mindless prescriptivism's greatest height. It was foreign. (It was almost certainty based on the inability to split infinitives in Latin and Greek, since they consist of one word only.) It had been routinely violated by the great writers in English; one 1931 study found split infinitives in English literature from every century, beginning with the fourteenth-century epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, through wrongdoers such as William Tyndale, Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others.

"The rule has no basis in clarity ('Who's that cake for?' is perfectly clear); history (it was made up from whole cloth); literary tradition (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Henry Adams, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and dozens of other great writers have violated it); or purity (it isn't native to English but probably stolen from Latin; clause-final prepositions exist in English's cousin languages such as Danish and Icelandic). Many people know that the Dryden rule is nonsense. From the great usage-book writer Henry Fowler in the early twentieth century, usage experts began to caution readers to ignore it. The New York Times flouts it. The 'rule' should be put to death, but it may never be. Even those who know it is ridiculous observe it for fear of annoying others."

delanceyplace.com 4/18/11 - the unwritten rules of baseball

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - with the baseball season in full swing, astute fans will want to brush up on the unwritten rules of baseball - those rules which are not in the official major league rulebook but are nevertheless stringently observed. Here are the unwritten rules that cover "basebrawls" - the fights that break out during games:

1.7.0. Basebrawls Are a Rare but Necessary Part of the Game, with Their Own Set of Rules

"There are times [such as when a pitcher intentionally hits a batter with a pitch] when the action of your opponent is so far over the line that the only answer is to duke it out on the field in a battle royale in which no one is actually likely to get hurt. It is a ritual closer to ballet than a true street fight.

1.7.1. In a Fight, Everyone Must Leave the Bench and the Bullpen Has to Join In

" 'No teammates are closer than they are in baseball, because there are so many games and players spend so much time with one another,' writes ESPN's Tim Kurkjian. 'As corny as it sounds, they become family, and when a family member is in a fight, everyone joins in. If a player doesn't run on the field, even if it's just to dance with the enemy, he might get fined and certainly will be ostracized by his teammates.' Teams become something of a family over the course of a long season, developing an 'all-for-one' mentality, and everyone goes out there to push and shove.

"There is a practical purpose to everybody going on the field, which is that it actually reduces the chance of anyone actually getting hurt. Writer Patrick Hruby has called 'Basebrawl Etiquette' a code of conduct 'as rigidly mannered as one of the dutiful, repressed English butlers in a Merchant-Ivory film.' One of the reasons that everyone is so willing to get into the faux battle is that everyone knows that when the dust settles, nothing much will really have happened, and it is rare that anyone will have been hurt.

"The extent to which this rule is observed can lapse into the extreme. During a 1984 Atlanta Braves-San Diego Padres scuffle, injured Brave Bob Horner - who was watching the game from the press box - raced down to the clubhouse, put on his uniform, and ended up in the middle of the brawl. Indians [then] manager Charlie Manuel was once suspended for two games for running onto the field from the clubhouse. Manuel had been ejected from the game, but said he could not in good conscience stay in the clubhouse while his players were throwing haymakers.

1.7.2. All Basebrawls Are Clean: No Cleats, No Sucker Punches, and No Bats

"Baseball fights normally are tame endeavors that do not last more than a few minutes, but every now and then, they get ugly and become donnybrooks. Former Brewers center fielder Gorman Thomas recalled a fight with New York during which Yankees pitcher Luis Tiant emerged from the tunnel and into the dugout wrapped only in a towel and smoking a cigar. 'It wasn't a pretty sight,' said Thomas to Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee journal Sentinel. But even here there were no cheap shots from behind. 'If you are going to fight, do it face-to-face' is the prime rule in play. This is not to say that baseball fights cannot become violent affairs. There are many examples of these, but none so graphic as Juan Marichal's use of a bat against John Roseboro on August 22, 1965. Fourteen stitches were required to close the gash in Roseboro's head.

1.7.3. When in Doubt, Dogpile

"A dogpile is a tussle that begins between two opposing players who are quickly buried under a human avalanche. Why dogpile? It protects the combatants and keeps the whole thing from getting out of control. There is a saying in baseball that the safest place to be in a fight is in the middle of it - or in this case, the bottom of it."

delanceyplace.com 4/15/11 - the slaves are freed

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:10:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the earliest days of the Civil War, well over a year before the Emancipation Proclamation, lawyer-turned-general Benjamin Franklin Butler used a brilliant bit of legal improvisation to begin the end of slavery in America. The artifice he crafted - to consider the slaves contraband of war - was troubling in its ultimate implications, but at a time when most in the North were still not prepared to view the conflict as a war against slavery, it served as a unexpectedly powerful first step towards emancipation:

"On May 23,1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black men rowed across the James River in Virginia and claimed asylum in a Union-held citadel. Fort Monroe, Va., a fishhook-shaped spit of land near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, had been a military post since the time of the first Jamestown settlers. This spot where the slaves took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the spot where slavery first took root, one summer day in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with some 20 African captives for the fledgling Virginia Colony. ...

"Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend were field hands who - like hundreds of other local slaves - had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. ... After a week or so of this, they learned some deeply unsettling news. Their master, a rebel colonel named Charles Mallory, was planning to send them even farther from home, to help build fortifications in North Carolina. That was when the three slaves decided to leave the Confederacy and try their luck, just across the water, with the Union. ...

"To Fort Monroe's new Union commander, Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler, the fugitives who turned up at his own front gate seemed like a novel case. The enemy had been deploying them to construct a battery aimed directly at his fort- and no doubt would put them straight back to work if recaptured, with time off only for a sound beating. They had just offered him some highly useful military intelligence. And Virginia, as of 12 or so hours ago, was officially in rebellion against the federal government, having just ratified the secession ordinance passed a month before.

"Butler had not invited the fugitives in or engineered their escape, but here they were, literally at his doorstep: a conundrum with political and military implications, at the very least. He could not have known - not yet - that his response that day might change the course of the national drama that was then just beginning. Yet it was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that an unanticipated bureaucratic dilemma would force the hand of history. ...

"Whatever Butler's decision on the three fugitives fate, he would have to reach it quickly. ... Waiting before the front gate was a man on horseback: Maj. John Baytop Cary of the 115th. With his silver gray whiskers and haughtily tilted chin, he appeared every inch the Southern cavalier.

"Butler, also on horseback, went out to meet him. The men rode, side by side, off federal property and into rebel Virginia. They must have seemed an odd pair: the dumpy Yankee, unaccustomed to the saddle, slouching along like a sack of potatoes; the trim, upright Virginian, in perfect control of himself and his mount.

"Cary got down to business. 'I am informed,' he said, 'that three Negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory's agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those Negroes?"

" 'I intend to hold them,' Butler said.

" 'Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?'

"Even the dour Butler must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever answer.

" 'I mean to take Virginia at her word,' he said. 'I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.'

" 'But you say we cannot secede,' Cary retorted, 'and so you cannot consistently detain the Negroes.'

" 'But you say you have seceded,' Butler said, 'so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.'

"Ever the diligent litigator, Butler had been reading up on his military law. In time of war, he knew, a commander had a right to seize any enemy property that was being used for hostile purposes. The three fugitive slaves, before their escape, were helping build a Confederate gun emplacement. Very well, then - if the Southerners insisted on treating blacks as property, this Yankee lawyer would treat them as property, too. Legally speaking, he had as much justification to confiscate Baker, Mallory, and Townsend as to intercept a shipment of muskets or swords. ...

"[As this practice rapidly caught on,] journalists throughout the Union quipped relentlessly about the 'shipments of contraband goods' or, in the words of The Times, 'contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide flight' - until, within a week or two after Butler's initial decision, the fugitives had a new name: contrabands. It was a perfectly composed bit slang, a minor triumph of Yankee ingenuity.

"Were these blacks people or property? Free or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable - for answering them would have raised a host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook by letting the escapees be all those things at once. 'Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,' one Union officer wrote. Within a few weeks, the average Northern newspaper reader could scan, without blinking, a sentence like this one: 'Several contrabands came into the camp of the First Connecticut Regiment today.' "

delanceyplace.com 4/14/11 - running shoes are bad for your feet

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - some members of an emerging class of very long distance runners known as "ultrarunners" have begun to advocate running barefoot or in thin-soled shoes:

"Running shoes may be the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot. ... Consider these words by Dr. Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University: 'A lot of foot and knee injuries that are currently plaguing us are actually caused by people running with shoes that actually make our feet weak, cause us to over-pronate, give us knee problems. Until 1972, when the modem athletic shoe was invented by Nike, people
ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet, and had much lower incidence of knee injuries.' ...

"We've shielded our feet from their natural position by providing more and more support," [Stanford track head coach Vin] Lananna insisted. That's why he made sure his runners always did part of their workouts in bare feet on the track's infield. ... 'I think you try to do all these corrective things with shoes and you overcompensate. You fix things that don't need fixing. If you strengthen the foot by going barefoot, I think you reduce the risk of Achilles and knee and plantar fascia problems.'

" 'Risk' isn't quite the right term; it's more like 'dead certainty.' Every year, anywhere from 65 to 80 percent of all runners suffer an injury. That's nearly every runner, every single year. No matter who you are, no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same. It doesn't matter if you're male or female, fast or slow, pudgy or ripped as a racehorse, your feet are still in the danger zone. Maybe you'll beat the odds if you stretch like a swami? Nope. In a 1993 study of Dutch athletes published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, one group of runners was taught how to warm up and stretch while a second group received no 'injury prevention' coaching. Their injury rates? Identical. Stretching came out even worse in a follow-up study performed the following year at the University of Hawaii; it found that runners who stretched were 33 percent more likely to get hurt. ...

"In fact, there's no evidence that running shoes are any help at all in injury prevention. ... Runners wearing top-of-the-line shoes are 123 percent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap shoes, according to a study led
by Bernard Marti, M.D., a preventative-medicine specialist at Switzerland's University of Bern. ...

" 'The deconditioned musculature of the foot is the greatest issue leading to injury, and we've allowed our feet to become badly deconditioned over the past twenty-five years,' [the Irish physical therapist] Dr. Gerard Hartmann said. ... 'Putting your feet in shoes is similar to putting them in a plaster cast,' Dr. Hartmann said. 'If I put your leg in plaster, we'll find forty to sixty percent atrophy of the musculature within six weeks. Something similar happens to your feet when they're encased in shoes.' When shoes are doing the work, tendons stiffen and muscles shrivel. Feet live for a fight and thrive under pressure; let them laze around, as [miler] Alan Webb discovered, and they'll collapse. Work them out, and they'll arc up like a rainbow. ...

"[The change began in 1962 when Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman created] the most cushioned running shoe ever created - the Cortez. ... Bowerman's deftest move was advocating a new style of running that was only possible in his new style of shoe. The Cortez allowed people to run in a way no human safely could before: by landing on their bony heels. Before the invention of a cushioned shoe, runners through the ages had identical form: Jesse Owens, Roger Bannister, Frank Shorter, and even Emil Zatopek all ran with backs straight, knees bent, feet scratching back under their hips. They had no choice: the only shock absorption came from the compression of their legs and their thick pad of midfoot fat. ...

"But Bowerman had an idea: maybe you could grab a little extra distance if you stepped ahead of your center of gravity. Stick a chunk of rubber under the heel, he mused, and you could straighten your leg, land on your heel, and lengthen your stride. ... He believed a 'heel-to-toe' stride would be 'the least tiring over long distances.' If you've got the shoe for it."

delanceyplace.com 4/13/11 - the education of jay-z

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - thirteen-year-old Jay-Z - now an extraordinarily successful hip hop artist and entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $450 million, thirteen Grammy Awards, and 50 million albums sold worldwide - found hope in hip-hop and a way out by hustling crack. Here he encounters the hip-hop rhymes of a New York neighborhood kid named Slate:

"His name was Slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood, an older kid who barely made an impression. In the circle, though, he was transformed, like the church ladies touched by the spirit, and everyone was mesmerized. He was rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time - thirty minutes straight off the top of his head, never losing the beat, riding the handclaps. He rhymed about nothing - the sidewalk, the benches - or he'd go in on the kids who were standing around listening to him, call out someone's leaning sneakers or dirty Lee jeans. And then he'd go in on how clean he was, how nice he was with the ball, how all our girls loved him. Then he'd just start rhyming about the rhymes themselves, how good they were, how much better they were than yours, how he was the best that ever did it, in all five boroughs and beyond. He never stopped moving, not dancing, just rotating in the center of the circle, looking for his next target. The sun started to set, the crowd moved in closer, the next clap kept coming, and he kept meeting it with another rhyme. It was like watching some kind of combat, but he was alone in the center. All he had were his eyes, taking in everything, and the words inside him. I was dazzled. That's some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then: I could do that.

"That night, I started writing rhymes in my spiral notebook. From the beginning it was easy, a constant flow. For days I filled page after page. Then I'd bang a beat out on the table, my bedroom window, whatever had a flat surface, and practice from the time I woke in the morning until I went to sleep. My mom would think I was up watching TV, but I'd be in the kitchen pounding on the table, rhyming. One day she brought a three-ring binder home from work for me to write in. The paper in the binder was unlined, and I filled every blank space on every page. My rhymes looked real chaotic, crowded against one another, some vertical, some slanting into the corners, but when I looked at them the order was clear....

"Everywhere I went I'd write. If I was crossing a street with my friends and a rhyme came to me, I'd break out my binder, spread it on a mailbox or lamppost and write the rhyme before I crossed the street. I didn't care if my friends left me at the light, I had to get it out. Even back then, I thought I was the best. ... I'd spend my free time reading the dictionary, building my vocabulary for battles ...

"No one hired a skywriter and announced crack's arrival. But when it landed in your hood, it was a total takeover. ... It wasn't a generational shift but a generational split. ... Guys my age, fed up with watching their moms struggle on a single income, were paying utility bills with money from hustling. So how could those same mothers sit them down about a truant report? Outside, in Marcy's courtyards and across the country, teenagers wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers. Broad-daylight shoot-outs had our grandmothers afraid to leave the house, and had neighbors who'd known us since we were toddlers forming Neighborhood Watches against us. There was a separation of style, too. Hip-hop was already moving fashion out of the disco clubs and popularizing rugged streetwear, but we'd take it even further: baggy jeans and puffy coats to stash work and weapons, construction boots to survive cold winter nights working on the streets.

"One day [my friend] Hill told me he was selling crack he was getting from a guy named Dee Dee. I told him I wanted to be down and he took me to meet the dude. I remember Dee Dee talking to us in a professional tone, taking his time so we'd really understand him. He explained that hustling was a business but it also had certain obvious, inherent risks, so we had to be disciplined. He knew that, like him, neither of us even smoked weed, so he wasn't worried that we'd get high off of the work, but he wanted to stress how real the game was, that as a hustle it required vision and dedication. We thought we had both. Plus, my friend had a cousin in Trenton, New Jersey, doing the same thing. All we needed were Metroliner tickets to join him....

"I was still rhyming, but now it took a backseat to hustling. It was all moving so fast, it was hard to make sense of it or see the big picture. Kids like me, the new hustlers, were going through something strange and twisted and had a crazy story to tell. And we needed to hear our story told back to us, so maybe we could start to understand ourselves. ...

"My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime.

"I lost people I loved, was betrayed by people I trusted; felt the breeze of bullets flying by my head. I saw crack addiction destroy families - it almost destroyed mine - but I sold it, too. I stood on cold corners far from home in the middle of the night serving crack fiends and then balled [partied] ridiculously in Vegas; I went dead broke and got hood rich on those streets. I hated it. I was addicted to it. It nearly killed me. ... I was part of a generation of kids who saw something special about what it means to be human - something bloody and dramatic and scandalous that happened right here in America - and hip-hop was our way of reporting that story, telling it to ourselves and the world."

delanceyplace.com 4/12/11 - the fragile legitimacy of china's leaders

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:17:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - at the very moment that China has surpassed Japan to become the world's second largest economy, its leaders face questions of their own legitimacy and authority - against a backdrop of a still-fragile global economy and an overdependence on exports. It is these leaders that must navigate the perilous path between inflation and real estate and stock market bubbles on the one hand and a pronounced domestic recession and high unemployment on the other, and it has left these leaders cautious and insecure regarding their own authority to make the necessary policy decisions:

"Chinese policymakers are rightfully concerned about asset-price bubbles and their aftermath, the balance sheet recession. Many ... are studying how Japan used fiscal policy to keep the economy going in spite of the massive fall in asset prices after the bubble burst.

"But today's fourth-generation leaders were not elected democratically, did not participate in the revolution, and have not achieved major successes on the economic front. As a result, they constantly face questions about their legitimacy. That has made them extremely cautious and prevented them from taking risks.

"Someone with [former leader] Deng Xiaoping's charisma and achievements could easily decide to move exchange rates or tax rates 10 percent in one direction, and, if that did not work, move 5 percent back. But none of the current leaders could afford such a mistake. A senior policyinaker once told me that: 'Ordinary Chinese do not think we are special - they see us only as lucky people who happened to be at the right place at the right time, caught Deng Xiaoping's eye, and were elevated to power.'

"When setting policy, therefore, these policymakers seek the assurance that anyone in their situation would have done the same. On the issue of renminbi revaluation, for example, there are alternative policies that would also reduce the trade imbalance with the U.S. - setting targets designed to boost imports from the U.S., say, or lowering the VAT rebate on exports. Given these alternatives, Chinese officials can revalue only if it is concluded that raising the currency's value would be a better option for China than all other alternatives. This kind of decision-making process takes time, particularly when the policy shift is a major one, because the leaders cannot risk a mistake.

"The officials' need to provide theoretical justification for their decisions sets them apart from past generations of Chinese leaders, and explains why academics have such high social standing in China today. Academics are critically important to the government for their ability to offer advice, design and run quantitative models to justify that advice, and conduct empirical studies. But their involvement also creates significant delays in the policymaking process. ...

"Another major problem facing the country - and one that is directly linked to the legitimacy of the current government - is the income disparity between the rapidly growing [wealthier] coastal areas and the [poorer] interior and rural regions. The legitimacy problem itself can be solved with elections because the elected representatives will then be able to claim that they were chosen by the people. China's senior leaders understand that, ultimately, this is the only way the legitimacy issue can be resolved. The problem is that, at present, only the 400 million people living along the coast, and not the 800 million in the interior, have benefited from economic reforms. Hence the income gap.

"If elections were held today, the 800 million who are unhappy with the current system would devour the 400 million who have prospered, causing the nation's reforms to collapse. If reforms and liberalization are to continue in an orderly fashion, therefore, elections will have to wait until this 8:4 ratio is reversed. Given that it took twenty-five years for the first 400 million to benefit from the reforms, this process will probably take another twenty to thirty years. But China's external imbalances have already reached the point at which immediate action is required. So while the nation's economic development will doubtless continue, it is also triggering a variety of domestic and international problems.

"The senior Chinese leaders I have spoken with demonstrated an excellent understanding of these issues. The people responsible for managing the economy are somc of the most capable people in the world - it almost seems as though the quality of the people available at the top is proportional to the size of the pool from which the nation has to draw."

delanceyplace.com 4/11/11 - I would rather die than hate you

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:14:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in 1630, John Winthrop, leader of the religious colonists who would establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered to them a sermon that is now considered one of the most important documents in setting forth a vision of America, "A Model of Christian Charity". Anticipating the hardships they will encounter during the coming months and years, it centers on the impossible idea that we should love our neighbors as ourselves:

"It makes sense that Winthrop, a man accustomed to setting lofty goals for himself, would then set lofty goals for the colony he is about to lead. 'A Model of Christian Charity' is the blueprint of his communal aspirations. Standing before his shipmates, Winthrop stares down the Sermon on the Mount, as every Christian must.

"[It presages] Martin Luther King, Jr., doing just that on November 17, 1957, in Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the 'loving your enemies' sermon this way: 'So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America , and over the world, I say to you, 'I love you. I would rather die than hate you.' "

"Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.'

"The Bible is a big long book and lord knows within its many mansions of eccentricity finding justification for literal and figurative witch hunts is as simple as pretending 'enhanced investigation techniques' is not a synonym for torture. I happen to be with King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount's call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D. in systematic theology.

" 'Man,' Winthrop reminds his shipmates in 'Christian Charity,' is 'commanded to love his neighbor as himself.' In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus puts the new in New Testament, informing his followers that they must do something way more difficult than being fond of the girl next door. Winthrop quotes him yet again. Matthew 5:44: 'Love your enemies ... do good to them that hate you.'

"He also cites Romans I 2:20: 'If thine enemy hunger, feed him.'

"The colonists of Massachusetts Bay are not going to be any better at living up to this than any other government in Christendom. (Just ask the Pequot, or at least the ones the New Englanders didn't burn to death.) In fact, nobody can live up to this, but it's the mark of a Christ-like Christian to know that he's supposed to.

"Winthrop's future neighbors? Not so much. In fact, one of his ongoing difficulties as governor of the colony is going to be that his charges find him far too lenient. For instance, when one of his fellow Massachusetts Bay magistrates accuses Winthrop of dillydallying on punishment by letting some men who had been banished continue to hang around Boston, Winthrop points out that the men had been banished, not sentenced to be executed. And since they had been banished in the dead of winter, Winthrop let them stay until a thaw so that their eviction from Massachusetts wouldn't cause them to freeze to death on their way out of town. I can hear the threatening voice-over in his opponent's attack ad come the next election. John Winthrop: soft on crime.

"This leads us to something undeniably remarkable: 'A Model of Christian Charity' was not written by a writer or a minister but rather by a governor. It isn't just a sermon, it is an act of leadership. And even if no one heard it, or no one was listening, it is, at the very least, a glimpse at what the chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed he and this grumpy few before him were supposed to shoot for come dry land. Two words, he says: 'justice and mercy.'

"For 'a community of perils,' writes Winthrop, 'calls for extraordinary liberality.' One cannot help but feel for this man. Here he is, pleading with Puritans to be flexible. In promoting what he calls 'enlargement toward others,' Winthrop has clearly thought through the possible pitfalls awaiting them on shore. He is worried about basic survival. He should be. He knows that half the Plymouth colonists perished in the first year. Thus he is reminding them of Christ's excruciating mandate to share. If thine enemy hunger, feed him."

delanceyplace.com 4/8/11 - why we have a minimum age for the presidency

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the United States Constitution established a minimum age of thirty-five years to be eligible to be president in part because the Founders sought to prevent the presidency from becoming a hereditary position:

delanceyplace.com 4/7/11 - the wizard of oz

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a new American fairy tale based on the awe and wonder he felt at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, but also filled with pervasive fear:

"The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition [was] the huge fair held on the outskirts of Chicago to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of America's discovery. ... With 50,000 exhibitors from fifty countries, the size and scope of the Chicago Expo was unprecedented. Between the beginning of May and the end of October 1893, the site was visited by one-quarter of the then total population of the United States. As no other event had done before, it offered a complete snapshot of a continent at its moment of self-definition. With its sparkling white Beaux-Arts architecture and massive scale, the 633-acre Jackson Park site was a staged illusion that had the power to transform reality through sheer force of will. For some ... it had the quality of a hallucination. ...

"After the 1893 Expo, America would not only be defined by the incredible fertility of its commercial and technological prowess, but also by its ability to create tangible dreams out of thin air. (emphasis added) ...

"Among the 27 million Expo visitors was a thirty-seven-year-old traveling salesman, L. Frank Baum. By 1893, he had already been through several careers as a playwright, a store owner, and a newspaper editor. ... At the same time, a young illustrator named W. W. Denslow was busy capturing the wonder of the Expo: 'It is literally stunning, the immensity of the thing,' he wrote in his diary.

"As the decade wore on, Baum found a new vocation as an author: after the publication of Mother Goose in Prose in 1897, he decided to write a new kind of children's story that would also attempt to capture America at a crux moment in its history. In November 1899, the team [of Baum and Denslow, who were] behind the year's most successful children's book, Father Goose, presented their next project to publisher George M. Hill: The Emerald City. Published the next August as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book featured twenty-four color plates and over one hundred illustrations within an arresting green and red cover. It sold out its first printing within two weeks and became the bestselling children's book of the 1900 Christmas season.

"Oz was designed as a break with tradition. Baum wrote in his introduction, 'The modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' was written solely to pleasure children of today. It aspires to being a modern fairy-tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained, and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.' This was an American story, full of 'exciting adventures,' 'unexpected difficulties,' and 'marvelous escapes.' ...

"Immediately enthralling to children, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz also appealed to adults as a world of psychological depth. Published within months of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, Baum's narrative was bookended by powerful evocations of flying and falling: an archetypal dream state within which, according to Freud, 'the pleasurable feelings attached to these experiences are transformed into anxiety.' Despite Baum's avowed intent to leave out the musty nightmares of European folktales, Oz was full of trickery, dismemberment, and pervasive fear."

delanceyplace.com 4/6/11 - how we got "do, re, mi"

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the Italian monk Guido of Arezzo invented the method of learning notes we now refer to as "do, re, mi" or solmization (from the notes "sol" and "mi") in about 1024 CE - thus giving each note or tone in the scale its own name. Along with his invention of the four-line musical staff, it allowed singers to master new music in a year rather than a decade, and permitted the subsequent rise of polyphony:

"Actually it was ut, re, mi, etc., that Guido invented. He got the names of the notes - ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la - from the initial syllables of the half lines that make up the first stanza of an eighth-century Latin hymn to John the Baptist written by Paul the Deacon. In this work, each nonitalicized syllable below fell on a higher successive tone of the hexachord, the first six notes of the major scale (c, d, e, f, g, a):

Ut queant laxis resonare fibris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solvepolluti labii reatum ...

(So that your servants can, with unrestrained voice, sing the wonders of your deeds, remove the guilt of our tainted lips!)

"The initial letters of "Sancte Iohannes," the next words in the text, which directly address St. John, later gave us the name of the note si, which was eventually changed to ti, just as ut was later changed to do and sol to so in many countries for reasons of euphony. The singing of vocal exercises to these syllables is termed solfeggio or solfege, names deriving from sol and fa, just as solmization itself is derived from sol and mi.

"The background to this development was the difficulty of teaching monks and cathedral singers the Gregorian chant, which was named for Pope Gregory the Great (590-604), though it probably coalesced about two hundred years after his time. This official music of the Roman Catholic liturgy was a monodic plainchant, meaning that the same notes were sung by all the voices. Although the Arabs had developed a system of musical notation in about 700, and the French manuscript called Musica enchiriadis ("Handbook of Music") used Latin letters for notation in c. 870, the most common system in Europe by the early tenth century was notation by means of neumes (from the Greek for 'breaths').

"Looking like accent marks placed higher or lower over words to be sung, neumes indicated in a slapdash way whether the pitch was rising or falling. This crude way of reminding singers of the direction their voices should go was better than nothing, but the specific pitches had to be laboriously memorized for each individual piece of music - and the church had a vast repertoire of hymns and liturgical songs.

"Enter the Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo (c. 991 - 1050) a composer, choirmaster, and theorist of liturgical music who is sometimes called 'the Father of Modern Music.' Building on insights gleaned from a French musical treatise, he and a fellow monk named Michael began to experiment with the teaching of music at the northern Italian monastery of Pomposa on the Adriatic coast.

"Their success was such that Guido became something of a celebrity in the locale, and the envy of the other monks caused him to depart for the city of Arezzo, southeast of Florence, in about 1025. Bishop Theodald of Arezzo gave him a job training singers of the cathedral school and asked him to write a book on musical theory. The resultant Micrologus de disciplina artis musicae (Manual of the Art of Music) in twenty chapters included discussions of early polyphony and was used as a standard European text for several hundred years.

"Guido's major innovation, however, was a protomodern system of musical notation. In his day, two lines were sometimes used to indicate the range of pitch within a composition - a red line to indicate the note now known as F and a yellow or green line to indicate C, and the aforementioned neumes were placed at varying distances from them to roughly indicate pitch. Guido added a black line between F and C and another black one above C to create the first four-line musical staff (the current five-line staff first appeared in 1200). He thus made use of his lines - as well as the spaces between them - to place letters indicating the specific notes. He continued to mark the C and F lines - the C would appear above the F for a song with a high melody, and the reverse would be the case for a lower melody. His symbols for these notes have now become our treble and bass clefs. Following on Guido's notation, square notes appeared in the thirteenth century, the ancestors of our oval ones.

"Now that musical intervals could be clearly indicated with Guido's notation and four-line staff, music could be learned much more rapidly - and composed and preserved much more efficiently - than in the past."

delanceyplace.com 4/5/11 - no free trade

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:22:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - although the United States is now an advocate of free trade among nations, during its infancy it relied on high tariffs to protect its emerging industries. In fact, the United States, Britain and virtually all of today's other wealthy countries used protectionism and subsidies to promote their infant industries, converting to a preference for free trade as those industries achieved dominance:

"Hamilton is [on the $10 bill] because, unbeknown to most Americans today, he is the architect of the modern American economic system. Two years after becoming Treasury Secretary in 1789 at the outrageously young age of thirty-three, Hamilton submitted to the Congress the Report on the Subject of Manufactures, where he set out the economic development strategy for his young country. In the report, he argued that 'industries in their infancy', like the American ones, need to be protected and nurtured by government before they can stand on their own feet. Hamilton's report was not just about trade protectionism - he also argued for public investment in infrastructure (such as canals), development of the banking system, promotion of a government bond market - but protectionism was at the heart of his strategy. Given his views, were Hamilton finance minister of a developing country today, he would have been heavily criticized by the US Treasury Department for his heresy. His country might even have been refused a loan from the IMF and the World Bank.

"The interesting thing, however, is that Hamilton was not alone in this. All the [founding fathers found pictured on U.S. currency] would have met with the same disapproval from the US Treasury, the IMF, the World Bank and other defenders of the free-market faith today. ...

"On the $5 bill, we have Abraham Lincoln, a well-known protectionist, who during the Civil War raised tariffs to their highest level ever.' On the $5o bill, we have Ulysses Grant, the Civil War hero-turned president. In defiance of the British pressure on the USA to adopt free trade, he once remarked that within 2oo years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade'.

"Benjamin Franklin did not share Hamilton's infant industry doctrine, but he insisted on high tariff protection for another reason. At the time, the existence of almost-free land in the US made it necessary for American manufacturers to offer wages around four times higher than the European average, as otherwise the workers would have run away to set up farms (this was no idle threat, given that many of them were farmers in their previous lives). Therefore, Franklin argued, the American manufacturers could not survive unless they were protected from low-wage competition - or what is known as 'social dumping' today - from Europe. ...

"During the mid eighteenth century, Britain moved into the woollen manufacturing industry, the high-tech industry of the time that had been dominated by the Low Countries (what are Belgium and the Netherlands today), with the help of tariff protection, subsidies, and other supports that Prime Minister Robert Walpole and his successors provided to the domestic woollen manufacturers. The industry soon provided Britain's main source of export earnings, which enabled the country to import the food and raw materials that it needed to launch the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Britain adopted free trade only in the 1860s, when its industrial dominance was absolute. In the same way in which the US was the most protectionist country in the world during most of its phase of ascendancy (from the 1830s to the 1940s), Britain was one of the world's most protectionist countries during much of its own economic rise (from the 1720s to the 185os)."

delanceyplace.com 4/4/11 - computers that read and learn

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:19:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - increasing numbers of large scale projects have been launched to create highly advanced, computer-based artificial intelligence systems. The most highly publicized of these has been "Watson," the system built by IBM which defeated the highest-rated Jeopardy champions. Another such system is NELL, which scours the world wide web reading and learning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and within its first six months of operation had developed some four hundred thousand beliefs:

"Mitchell's goal was not to build a smart computer but to construct a body of knowledge - a corpus - that smart computers everywhere could turn to as a reference. This computer, he hoped, would be doing on a global scale what the human experts in chemistry had done, at considerable cost, for [Paul Allen's Project] Halo artificial intelligence system. Like Watson, Mitchell's Read-the-Web computer, later called NELL, would feature a broad range of analytical tools, each one making sense of the readings from its own perspective. Some would compare word groups, others would parse the grammar. 'Learning method A might decide, with 8o percent probability, that Pittsburgh is a city,' Mitchell said. 'Method C believes that Luke Ravenstahl is the mayor of Pittsburgh.' As the system processed these two beliefs, it would find them consistent and mutually reinforcing. If the entity called Pittsburgh had a mayor, there was a good chance it was a city. Confidence in that belief would rise. The computer would learn.

"Mitchell's team turned on NELL in January 2010. It worked on a subsection of the Web, a cross section of two hundred million Web pages that had been culled and curated by Mitchell's colleague Jamie Callan. (Operating with a fixed training set made it easier in the early days to diagnose troubles and carry out experiments.) Within six months, the machine had developed some four hundred thousand beliefs - a minute fraction of what it would need for a global knowledge base. But Mitchell saw NELL and other fact-hunting systems growing quickly. 'Within ten years,' he predicted, 'we'll have computer programs that can read and extract 80 percent of the content of the Web, which itself will be much bigger and richer.' This, he said, would produce 'a huge knowledge base that AI (artificial intelligence) can work from.' "

delanceyplace.com 4/1/11 - notes vs. noises

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - defining the difference between musical notes and ordinary noises:

"Every day you will hear millions of sounds and only a few of them will be musical notes. Usually, musical notes are created deliberately from a musical instrument, but they can be produced in non-musical situations - when you 'ping' a wineglass or ring a doorbell, for example. Whenever and however they are produced, musical notes sound different from all other noises.

"What's the difference between a musical note and any other sort of noise? Everyone you know will have some sort of answer to this question, but most of them will be based on the idea that musical notes sound ... er ... musical and other noises are ... er ... not musical. ...

"If you throw a stone into a flat, calm pond you will disturb the surface of the water and create ripples which travel away from the initial splash. Similarly, if you click your fingers in a quiet room, you will disturb the air and ripples of disturbance will move away from your hand. In the case of the stone in the pond, the ripples involve a change in the height of the water and our eyes can clearly see what's going on: the height of the water goes up-down-up-down-up-down as the ripples travel away from the splash.

"When you click your fingers (or make any other sound, including a musical note), the sound ripples traveling toward your ears involve changes in the pressure of the air. We can't see these ripples but our ears can hear them. When the ripples reach our ears, the air pressure goes up-down-up-down-up-down and this makes our eardrums go in-out-in-out-in-out at the same rate - because our eardrums are like tiny, flexible trampolines which are easily
pushed in and out by changes in the air pressure. Your brain then analyzes the in-out movement of your eardrums and decides what's going on - is it time to run away or time to order dessert? ...

"If we could see the pressure ripples of these non-musical sounds, we would notice that they were very complicated. ... The noise ripple shape [of, for example, a door closing] which eventually arrives at the eardrum is extremely complicated because it is made up of a chaotic group of individual ripples which have no relationship to each other. This is true of all noises which are not musical notes. The noise ripple shape which eventually arrives at the eardrum is extremely complicated because it is made up of a chaotic group of individual ripples which have no relationship to each other. This is true of all noises which are not musical notes.

"Musical notes are different from non-musical noises because every musical note is made up of a ripple pattern which repeats itself over and over again. ... To be a musical note, it doesn't really matter how complicated the individual ripples are, as long as the pattern repeats itself. Our eardrums flex in and out as the pressure ripples push against them. However, our eardrums can't respond properly if the ripple pattern repeats itself too quickly or too slowly - we can only hear patterns which repeat themselves more often than twenty times a second but less often than 2o,ooo times a second.

"Musical notes don't need to be made by musical instruments, in fact, anything which vibrates or disturbs the air in a regular way between twenty and 20,000 times a second will produce a note. High-speed motorbike engines or dentists' drills produce notes. In the song 'The Facts of Life,' the band Talking Heads uses what sounds like a compressed air-powered drill to produce one of the notes of the background accompaniment. This combination of music and engineering fits well with the lyrics, which compare love to a machine.

"Musical instruments are simply devices which have been designed to produce notes in a controlled way. A musician uses finger movement or lung power to start something vibrating at chosen frequencies - and notes are produced."

delanceyplace.com 3/31/11 - supersizing

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:11:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - supersizing and the 'thrifty gene':

"That distinction [of inventing supersizing] belongs to a man named David Wallerstein. Until his death in 1993, Wallerstein served on the board of directors at McDonald's but in the fifties and sixties he worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas where he labored to expand sales of soda and popcorn - the high-markup items that theaters depend on for their profitability. As the story is told in John Love's official history of McDonald's, Wallerstein tried everything he could think of to goose up sales - two-for-one deals, matinee specials - but found he simply could not induce customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish.

"Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda - a lot more - as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and in time the Big Mac and the jumbo fries, though Ray Kroc himself took some convincing. In 1968, Wallerstein went to work for McDonald's, but try as he might he couldn't convince Kroc, the company's founder, of supersizing's magic powers.

" 'If people want more fries' Kroc told him 'they can buy two bags.' Wallerstein patiently explained that McDonald's customers did want more but were reluctant to buy a second bag. 'They don't want to look like gluttons.'

"Kroc remained skeptical, so Wallerstein went looking for proof. He began staking out McDonald's outlets in and around Chicago observing how people ate. He saw customers noisily draining their sodas and digging infinitesimal bits of salt and burnt spud out of their little bags of French fries. After Wallerstein presented his findings, Kroc relented and approved supersized portions and the dramatic spike in sales confirmed the marketer's hunch. Deep cultural taboos against gluttony - one of the seven deadly sins, after all - had been holding us back. Wallerstein's dubious achievement was to devise the dietary equivalent of a papal dispensation: Supersize it! He had discovered the secret to expanding the (supposedly) fixed human stomach.

"One might think that people would stop eating and drinking these gargantuan portions as soon as they felt full, but it turns out hunger doesn't work that way. Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise. Human appetite it turns out is surprisingly elastic which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter-gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine. Obesity researchers call this trait the 'thrifty gene.' And while the gene represents a useful adaptation in an environment of food scarcity and unpredictability, it's a disaster in an environment of fast-food abundance when the opportunity to feast presents itself 24/7. Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes."

delanceyplace.com 3/30/11 - getting the gist of it

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - even a Jeopardy uberchampion like Ken Jennings uses basic 'associative' reasoning techniques to answer many of the contest questions. Because only a woeful fifty bits of information per second make their way into the conscious brain, while an estimated eleven million bits of data flow from the senses every second, all of us regularly rely on the "gist" of things in our reasoning:

"A century ago, the psychologist William James divided human thought into two types, associative and true reasoning. For James, associative thinking worked from historical patterns and rules in the mind. True reasoning, which was necessary for unprecedented problems, demanded deeper analysis. This came to be known as the 'dual process' theory. Late in the twentieth century, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton redefined these cognitive processes as System 1 and System 2. The intuitive System 1 appeared to represent a primitive part of the mind, perhaps dating from before the cognitive leap undertaken by our tool-making Cro-Magnon ancestors forty thousand years ago, Its embedded rules, with their biases toward the familiar, steered people toward their most basic goals: survival and reproduction. System 2, which appeared to arrive later, involved conscious and deliberate analysis and was far slower. When it came to intelligence, all humans were more or less on an equal footing in the ancient and intuitive System 1. The rules were easy, and whether they made sense or not, everyone knew them. It was in the slower realm of reasoning, System 2, that intelligent people distinguished themselves from the crowd.

"Still, great Jeopardy players like Ken Jennings cannot afford to ignore the signals coming from the caveman quarters of their minds. They need speed, and the easy answers pouring in through System 1 are often correct. But they have to know when to distrust this reflexive thought, when to pursue a longer and more analytical route. In [one] game, ... this clue popped up in the Tricky Questions category: 'Total number of each animal that Moses took on the ark with him during the great flood.' Jennings lost the buzz to Matt Kleinmaier, a medical student from Chicago, who answered, 'What is two?' It was wrong. Jennings, aware that it was supposed to be tricky, noticed that it asked for 'each animal' instead of 'each species.' He buzzed for a second chance at the clue and answered, 'What is one?' That was wrong, too. The correct answer, which no one came up with, was 'What is zero?'

"Jennings and Kleinmaier had fallen for a trick. Each had focused on the gist of the clue—the number of animals boarding the biblical ark—while ignoring one detail: The ark builder was Noah, not Moses. This clue actually came from a decades-old psychological experiment, one that has given a name—the Moses Illusion—to the careless thinking that most humans employ.

"It's easy enough to understand. The brain groups information into clusters. ... People tend to notice when one piece of information doesn't jibe with its expected group. It's an anomaly. But Noah and Moses cohabit numerous clusters. Thematically they are both in the Bible, visually, both wear beards. Phonetically, their names almost rhyme. A question about Ezekiel herding animals into the ark might not pass so smoothly. According to a study headed by Lynn Reder, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon, the Moses Illusion illustrates a facet of human intelligence, one vital for jeopardy.

"Most of what humans experience as perception is actually furnished by the memory. This is because the conscious brain can only process a trickle of data. Psychologists agree that only one to four 'items,' either thoughts or sensations, can be held in mind, immediately available to consciousness, at the same time. Some have tried to quantify these constraints. According to the work of Manfred Zimmerman of Germany's Heidelberg University, only a woeful fifty bits of information per second make their way into the conscious brain, while an estimated eleven million bits of data flow from the senses every second. Many psychologists object to these attempts to measure thoughts and perceptions as digital bits. But however they're measured, the stark limits of the mind are clear. It's as if each person's senses generated enough data to run a 3D Omnimax movie with Dolby sound—only to funnel it through an antediluvian modem, one better suited to Morse code. So how do humans re-create the Omnimax experience? They focus on the items that appear most relevant and round them out with stored memories, what psychologists call 'schemas.'

"In the Moses example, people concentrate on the question about animals. The biblical details, which appear to fit into their expected clusters, are ignored. It's only when a wrong name intrudes from outside the expected orbit that alarms go off. In one experiment at Carnegie Mellon, when researchers substituted a former U.S. president for Moses, people noticed right away. Nixon had nothing to do with the ark, they said."

delanceyplace.com 3/29/11 - our beloved constitution

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - from the very first days of its publication, the United States Constitution has been criticized by many as difficult to understand and interpret. And the physical document itself suffered decades of neglect before it was finally enshrined:

"Three delegates refused to sign [the constitution upon its approval by the Constitutional Convention], but at the bottom of the fourth page appear the signatures of the rest. What was written on parchment was then made public,
printed in newspapers and broadsheets, often with 'We the People' set off in extra-large type. Meanwhile, the secretary of the convention carried the original [from Philadelphia] to New York to present it to [the Continental] Congress, which met, at the time, at City Hall. Without either endorsing or opposing it, Congress agreed to forward the Constitution to the states for ratification. The original Constitution was simply filed away and, later, shuffled
from one place to another. When City Hall underwent renovations, the Constitution was transferred to the Department of State. The following year, it moved with Congress to Philadelphia and, in 1800, to Washington, where it was stored at the Treasury Department until it was shifted to the War Office. In 1814, three clerks stuffed it into a linen sack and carried it to a gristmill in Virginia, which was fortunate, because the British burned Washington down. In the eighteen-twenties, when someone asked James Madison where it was, he had no idea.

"In 1875, the Constitution found a home in a tin box in the bottom of a closet in a new building that housed the Departments of State, War, and in 1894, it was sealed between glass plates and locked in a safe in the basement. In 1921, Herbert Putnam, a librarian, drove it across town in his Model T. In 1924, it was put on display in the Library of Congress, for the first time ever. Before then, no one had thought of that. It spent the Second World War at Fort Knox. In 1952, it was driven in an armored tank under military guard to the National Archives, where it remains, in a shrine in the rotunda, alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. ...

"If you haven't read the Constitution lately, do. Chances are you'll find that it doesn't exactly explain itself. Consider Article III, Section 3: 'The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of
Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.' This is simply put - hats off to the committee of style - but what does it mean? A legal education helps. Lawyers won't stumble over 'attainder,' even if the rest of us will. Part of the problem might appear to be the distance between our locution and theirs. 'Corruption of Blood'? The document's learnedness and the changing meaning of words isn't the whole problem, though, because the charge that the Constitution is too difficult for ordinary people to understand - not because of its vocabulary but because of the complexity of its ideas - was brought nearly the minute it was made public.

"Anti-Federalists charged that the Constitution was so difficult to read that it amounted to a conspiracy against the understanding of a plain man, that it was willfully incomprehensible. 'The constitution of a wise and free people, ought to be as evident to simple reason, as the letters of our alphabet,' an Anti-Federalist wrote. 'A constiution ought to be, like a beacon, held up to the public eye, so as to be understood by every man,' Patrick Henry argued. He believed that what was drafted in Philadelphia was 'of such an intricate and complicated nature, that no man on this earth can know its real operation.' Anti-Federalists had more complaints, too, which is why ratification - a process
wonderfully recounted by Pauline Maier in 'Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788' - was touch and go. Rhode Island, the only state to hold a popular referendum on the Constitution, rejected it. Elsewhere, in state ratifying conventions, the Constitution passed by the narrowest of margins: eighty-nine to seventy-nine in Virginia, thirty to twenty-seven in New York, a hundred and eighty-seven to a hundred and sixty-eight in Massachusetts."...

"[The Constitution has] forty-four hundred words and 'God' is not one of them, as Benjamin Rush complained to John Adams, hoping for an emendation: 'Perhaps an acknowledgement might be made of his goodness or of his providence in the proposed amendments.' It was not."

delanceyplace.com 3/28/11 - waves of revolutions

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of large states were ruled by autocrats, and virtually all the people in those states lived in poverty. Since then, however, international waves of revolution have been common, as the decentralization of economic power brought by the Industrial Revolution has created an imperative for the decentralization of political power:

"The Arab revolts have come in waves. Beginning in Tunisia, unrest spread across Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen within weeks. Chants against autocratic rule echo beyond the Arab world, in Iran and China. Dictators between Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa follow the rapid escalation of events with apprehension. Most commentators are captivated by the momentum of the revolutionary wave. For historians, though, the phenomenon is anything but new.

"Few events in history have captured the attention of scholars more than revolutions. Over centuries revolts have brought about the most radical change of political order in societies - and they have spread, crossing borders and even oceans, at times engulfing entire regions of the world.

"The earliest revolutionary wave in modern history was the Atlantic Revolutions, which began with the American Revolution of 1776 and, in 1789, swept over to France. Inspired by the idea of liberty, revolutionaries fought against aristocratic and colonial rule. They sparked the Haitian Revolution of 1791, the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and revolutionary wars in Latin America.

"More closely linked were the upheavals of 1848. Across Europe, revolutionaries, radicalised by the ideas of liberalism and nationalism, went to the barricades to confront absolutism. Revolts began in January in the streets of Palermo, the Sicilian capital, soon sparking unrest on the Italian peninsula. The February Revolution in France toppled King Louis-Philippe and led to an escalation of events. Civil war spread across the German states, the Habsburg Empire, Denmark and Ireland. In many places martial law was declared and most upheavals were put down, with thousands killed. For many who took part in the uprisings the international scope of their revolt was crucial. In early 1848 Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto calling on 'workers of the world' to unite. For decades socialists would promote the idea of 'world revolution', a concept based on the notion of revolutionary waves.

"In Asia the events of 1848 were mirrored in the Constitutional Revolutions of the early 20th century. Japan's defeat of Russia and the ensuing Russian Revolution of 1905 sparked the Persian Constitutional Revolution in the same year, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire and, finally, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the 1912 Palace Revolt in Siam (now Thailand). In the Russo-Japanese War a non-European country with a constitution had prevailed over a European country without a constitution. Meiji Japan was a shining model of modernisation in the eyes of many activists and reformers in Asia, eager to confront traditional society and autocratic political order. Its example even provoked uprisings in European colonial dominions, most notably in British India and Dutch Indonesia.

"Surprisingly, the immediate effects of the October Revolution of 1917 were less extensive. Outside of Russia most attempts to establish socialist states were soon shattered. The November 1918 Revolution in Germany and the proclamation of the Munich Soviet Republic, the socialist uprisings in Italy, the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 and the foundation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic all failed, as did the Iranian revolutionaries, who, led by the charismatic guerrilla leader Mirza Kuchik Khan, in 1920 proclaimed the short-lived Persian Socialist Soviet Republic.

"More intense was the wave of anti-colonial and national upheavals after the First World War. Fuelled by President Wilson's promises in 1918 of national self-determination, anti-colonial demonstrations ensued in Egypt, India, Korea and China. In Cairo, Egyptian women, for the first time in history, went onto the streets to join in public protest. In the end, the moment of upheaval, the 'Wilsonian Moment', as the Harvard historian Erez Manela called it, receded. The European powers were unwilling to grant freedom. Hopes for national independence and sovereignty remained unfulfilled.

"Soon, however, anti-colonial revolutionaries would rise again. During the Cold War several chains of revolutions shocked Africa, South-East Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Marxist slogans of world revolution fired American paranoia about the spread of Communism through a domino effect. Ironically, the Cold War ended in a wave of demonstrations that overthrew the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Protests began in Poland, spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia and finally reached Ceausescu's Romania in December 1989. Earlier that year, in China, the Tiananmen Square protests were crushed in a bloodbath, while Communist rule was abandoned across most of Asia and Africa. For contemporary observers these events marked nothing less than the definite victory of liberal democracy - the 'end of history', as the American intellectual Francis Fukuyama rejoiced prematurely. Since then new waves, the Colour Revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia and the current upheavals in the Middle East, have followed.

"Scholars have enquired into general patterns of revolutionary waves, seeking to understand the mechanisms that make them spread. A crucial condition, they agree, is communication. In the Atlantic Revolutions, which stretched over more than two decades of the 18th century, revolutionaries and their ideas could only cross the ocean by sailing vessel. As modern communication developed, the pace of revolutionary waves increased. In 1905, when the Constitutional Revolutions shook Asia, revolutionary slogans were circulated by the telegraph and modern means of transport, by railways and steamers. In the course of the 20th century technological innovations became ever more important for the expansion of political mass mobilisation. Drawing on satellite television, mobile phones and the Internet, the Arab revolts spread in weeks. Within seconds, revolutionaries send their messages against tyranny around the world. Unsurprisingly, dictators today feel uneasy about social media websites like Facebook and Twitter.

"Over the last two centuries revolutionaries have celebrated epochal victories, but most of the time their protests have ended in tears and disillusionment. Even within a revolutionary wave, the outcomes have often varied considerably from country to country. Revolutions are usually commemorated as distinct national events. The French Revolution is and remains 'French' in that country's popular memory, just like the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905 is remembered as an 'Iranian' event in Iran and the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 as an 'Egyptian' revolt by Egyptians. In German national commemoration, it was protests in Leipzig and Dresden that brought down the wall in 1989. In the age of the nation state, we have come to glorify revolutions as national events. Yet most of the time they were - and are - strikingly international."

delanceyplace.com 3/25/11 - miracle drugs

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:38:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - in the late 1940s, a succession of miracle drugs came into use that gave Americans a growing sense of invincibility:

"In the late 1940s, a cornucopia of pharmaceutical discoveries was tumbling open in labs and clinics around the nation. The most iconic of these new drugs were the antibiotics. Penicillin, that precious chemical that had to be milked to its last droplet during World War 11 (in 1939, the drug was reextracted from the urine of patients who had been treated with it to conserve every last molecule), was by the early fifties being produced in thousand-gallon vats. in 1942, when Merck had shipped out its first batch of penicillin - a mere five and a half grams of the drug - that amount had represented half of the entire stock of the antibiotic in America. A decade later, penicillin was being mass-produced so effectively that its price had sunk to four cents for a dose, one-eighth the cost of a half gallon of milk.

"New antibiotics followed in the footsteps of penicillin: chloramphenicol in 1947, tetracycline in 1948. In the winter of 1949, when yet another miraculous antibiotic, streptomycin, was purified out of a clod of mold from a chicken farmer's barnyard, Time magazine splashed the phrase 'The remedies are in our own backyard,' prominently across its cover. In a brick building on the far corner of Children's Hospital, in Farber's own backyard, a microbiologist named John Enders was culturing poliovirus in rolling plastic flasks, the first step that culminated in the development of the Sabin and Salk polio vaccines. New drugs appeared at an astonishing rate: by 1950, more than half the medicines in common medical use had been unknown merely a decade earlier.

"Perhaps even more significant than these miracle drugs, shifts in public health and hygiene also drastically altered the national physiognomy of illness. Typhoid fever, a contagion whose deadly swirl could decimate entire districts in weeks, melted away as the putrid water supplies of several cities were cleansed by massive municipal efforts. Even tuberculosis, the infamous 'white plague' of the nineteenth century, was vanishing, its incidence plummeting by more than half between 1910 and 1940, largely due to better sanitation and public hygiene efforts. The life expectancy of Americans rose from forty-seven to sixty-eight in half a century, a greater leap in longevity than had been achieved over several previous centuries.

"The sweeping victories of postwar medicine illustrated the potent and transformative capacity of science and technology in American life. Hospitals proliferated - between 1945 and 1960, nearly one thousand new hospitals were launched nationwide; between 1935 and 1952, the number of patients admitted more than doubled from 7 million to 17 million per year. And with the rise in medical care came the concomitant expectation of medical cure. As one student observed, 'When a doctor has to tell a patient that there is no specific remedy for his condition, [the patient] is apt to feel affronted, or to wonder whether the doctor is keeping abreast of the times.'

"In new and sanitized suburban towns, a young generation thus dreamed of cures - of a death-free, disease-free existence. Lulled by the idea of the durability of life, they threw themselves into consuming durables: boat-size Studebakers, rayon leisure suits, televisions, radios, vacation homes, golf clubs, barbecue grills, washing machines. In Levittown, a sprawling suburban settlement built in a potato field on Long Island - a symbolic utopia - 'illness' now ranked third in a list of 'worries,' falling behind 'finances' and 'child-rearing.' In fact, rearing children was becoming a national preoccupation at an unprecedented level. Fertility rose steadily - by 1957, a baby was being born every seven seconds in America. The 'affluent society,' as the economist John Galbraith described it, also imagined itself as eternally young, with an accompanying guarantee of eternal health - the invincible society."

delanceyplace.com 3/24/11 - killing the leader often makes the problem worse

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:16:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - American strategy to combat terrorist groups such as al Qaeda has centered on finding and removing the leaders of these groups, a strategy known as 'decapitation.' A rigorous analysis of all 298 such cases of leadership decapitation in terrorist groups from 1945 to 2004 suggests that this may be an unproductive strategy - that these leadership gaps are quickly filled and that groups become more virulent as a result compared to similar groups where this strategy is not employed. In fact, groups that have not had their leaders targeted have a higher rate of decline than groups whose leaders have been removed:

"Immediately following the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, President George W. Bush announced that a 'severe blow' had been dealt to al Qaeda. Leadership decapitation is not limited to U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The arrests of the Shining Path's Abimael Guzman and the Kurdistan Workers' Party's (PKK) Abdullah Ocalan are commonly cited as examples of successful decapitation. Israel has consistently targeted the leaders of HAMAS. The arrest of Basque Homeland and Freedom's (ETA) leader Francisco Mugica Garmenia was seen as likely to result in ETA's collapse but authorities determined that the organization was much more complicated than they had assumed. The recent arrests of two ETA leaders in May and November of 2008 have been characterized by Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as a 'definitive operation in the fight against ETA.'

"Despite a tremendous amount of optimism toward the success of decapitation, there is very little evidence on whether and when removing leaders will result in organizational collapse. Moreover there are inconsistencies among current studies of decapitation. A core problem with the current literature and a primary reason for discrepancy over the effectiveness of decapitation is a lack of solid empirical foundations. In order to develop an empirically grounded assessment of leadership targeting this study examines variation in the success of leadership decapitation by developing a comprehensive dataset of 298 cases of leadership decapitation from 1945-2004. The overarching goal of this article is to explain whether decapitation is effective. ...

"Optimism toward the success of decapitation is based primarily on theories of charismatic leadership. ... Social network analysis which is rooted in sociological studies of organizational dynamics would predict more variability in the success of decapitation. ...

"A [terrorist] group's age, size and type are all important predictors of when decapitation is likely to be effective. The data indicate that as an organization becomes larger and older decapitation is less likely to result in organizational collapse. Furthermore religious groups are highly resistant to attacks on their leadership while ideological organizations are much easier to destabilize through decapitation.

"Second, the data also show that decapitation is not an effective counterterrorism strategy. Decapitation does not increase the likelihood of organizational collapse beyond to a baseline rate of collapse for groups over time. The marginal utility for decapitation is actually negative. Groups that have not had their leaders targeted have a higher rate of decline than groups whose leaders have been removed. Decapitation is actually counterproductive particularly for larger, older, religious or separatist organizations.

"Finally, in order to determine whether decapitation hindered the ability of an organization to carry out terrorist attacks I looked at three cases in which decapitation did not result in a group's collapse. The results were mixed over the extent to which decapitation has resulted in organizational degradation. While in some cases decapitation resulted in fewer attacks in others the attacks became more lethal in the years immediately following incidents of decapitation. I argue that these results are largely driven by a group's size and age.

"Ultimately these findings indicate that our current counterterrorism strategies need rethinking. The data show that independent of other measures going after the leaders of older larger and religious groups is not only ineffective it is counterproductive. Moreover, the decentralized nature of many current terrorist organizations has proven to be highly resistant to decapitation and to other counterterrorism measures."

delanceyplace.com 3/23/11 - forests become deserts

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:31:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - Mesopotamia is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which largely corresponds to modern day Iraq and surrounding lands. The violent floods from those two rivers gave rise to the earliest flood myths. The word Mesopotamia literally means "between the rivers," and it was the land of the great early civilizations of Sumer, Assyria, Akkadia and Babylon - in fact it is known as the cradle of civilizations. Though now a desert, in those ancient times Mesopotamia was filled with luxurious forests and vast farms of wheat and barley. Then the population dwindled and the land lost its fertility. Why?:

"In Sumeria begins the original urban revolution, and the civilizing influence of the city throughout history. The great cities of history were integrally linked to man's uses of water and were, without fail, situated on rivers, lakes, oases, and seashores. ... Sumerian vessels traded long-distance with Egypt via the Red Sea and plied the Gulf and the Indian Ocean at least to the ancient Indus River civilization. ...

"The vital economic activity of the earliest Sumerian city-states, however, was irrigation agriculture. Each had its own farm work gangs comprised of many hundreds of farmers who worked large tracts of land that was owned, rented, or bequeathed by the gods. As in Egypt, coerced labor was done under schedules and regulations set by temple priests, who alone possessed the skills for calculating the changes of season, designing canals, and coordinating mass, collective effort. Thereligious provenance of the priesthood legitimized their taking large shares of the annual harvest surpluses for storage in the temple granaries.

"Violent, unpredictable floods that destroyed waterworks and entire cities were an omnipresent, terrifying menace. Indeed, in Mesopotamian mythology the quasi-divine status of kings and the state's political legitimacy itself sprang from a purifying great flood sent by the gods to obliterate humanity and from whose watery chaos a new world order was born. The region's flood myth centered on a single, forewarned family that survived by building an ark - the progenitor of strikingly similar stories in Hindu mythology and the Noah story in Genesis. ...

"Crops were grown on miles-long earthen embankments set amid the watery plain between the rivers and controlled by a matrix of dams, dikes, weirs, sluices, and ditches. One benefit of this arduous, artificial irrigation was that it permitted year-round, multicrop farming that yielded larger stockpiles than Egypt's single-crop basin system. Yet artificial irrigation also came with a terrible side effect that afflicted civilizations throughout history - salinization of the soil. ...

"Over time, intensive irrigation farming had environmental side effects that undermined its sustainability. It tended to raise the level of groundwater to waterlog the soils, while water's capillary action drew deadly salt toward plant roots. Evaporation, which was especially rapid in hot, arid Mesopotamia, left the telltale crusted salt residue across the once-fertile surface-crop yields fell until finally little at all could grow. Mesopotamian tablets from 1800 BC duly record 'black fields becoming white.' To cope with salinization, the Sumerians shifted production from wheat to more-salt-resistant barley. In about 3500 BC, equal amounts of wheat and barley were being grown in Sumeria. A thousand years later, only 15 percent of the crop was wheat. By 1700 BC almost no wheat was being grown, and yields from both crops had declined by some 65 percent over seven centuries.

"World history is replete with societal declines and collapses caused by soil salinization. ... A second man-made environmental depletion also exacerbated Mesopotamia's agricultural crisis - deforestation. Wherever humans have settled on Earth, they have chopped down trees - for fuel, houses, boats, tools, and agricultural-land clearance - until their habitats were denuded. Many now-barren parts of Mesopotamia, as elsewhere in the neighboring Mediterranean rim, were once luxuriously verdant. Deforestation made landscapes drier and less fertile. It reduced rainfall as well as the capacity of the soil to retain what did fall. More of the fertile topsoil washed away in torrential downpours - a malevolent expression of water's power as history's greatest soil mover, surpassed only by modern industrial man himself."

delanceyplace.com 3/22/11 - how loud is loud

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - we do not hear two instruments being played at the same time as being twice as loud as one. In fact, when we hear 100 instruments, we perceive them as being only four times as loud as a single instrument. That is due to two things - first, unless they are absolutely identical, the pressure ripples (sound waves) from multiple instruments partially cancel each other out, and second, our brains operate in a manner so as to protect itself by dampening the effect of increasingly loud noise:

"If we have two instruments (such as glockenspiels), we only get double the effect if the up-down-up-down pressure ripples (sound waves, which have the effect of alternating increased and decreased pressure) from them are perfectly in step with each other. If so, they can act together to give a [perfectly synchronized] UP-DOWN-UP-DOWN pressure ripple.

"But, when we hit both instruments, you can bet your life that we don't hit them exactly at the same time, so the pressure ripples from the two instruments won't be in step when they reach the microphone. This means that sometimes the 'pressure up' part of one ripple will be trying to raise the air pressure as the 'pressure down' part of the other is trying to lower it. if the wave patterns were perfectly out of step, the up-down-up-down of one of them would be canceled out by the down-up-down-up of the other - and we wouldn't hear a note at all.

"This is weird but true - it's how some farmers protect their hearing when they are driving noisy tractors all day. They buy 'active ear defenders' which look like headphones. Inside each of the earpieces is a microphone and a speaker connected to some electronics. The microphone listens to the sound which is about to reach your eardrum and makes the speaker produce the same pressure wave - but out of step with the original one. The idea is that when the two pressure waves meet, one of them tries to raise the pressure at the same time as the other tries to lower it - so nothing much happens and the eardrum is left in peace. In practice the sound waves are too complicated for this to work exactly, but it does reduce most of the noise.

"Going back to our glockenspiels, the canceling out is nowhere near perfect because it would be too difficult to organize - the sound waves are coming from different places in the room and also bouncing off the walls, and it's incredibly unlikely that you would hit the instruments at precisely the right times to get the ripple patterns exactly out of step just at the point where they meet the microphone. What actually happens is that we do get more sound pressure from two instruments than we would from one - but there is some interference from the low-pressure bits of one wave pattern with the high-pressure bits of the other, so there is some canceling out.

"If more instruments are involved, the amount of canceling out gets more serious. The pressure of the air next to the microphone can only be higher than normal (pushing the microphone inward) or lower than normal (pulling it outward): it can't be both at once. If we play forty glockenspiels, each of our forty glockenspiels has an 'up pressure' or 'down pressure' vote at any point in time -but a lot of these votes cancel each other out. If a forty-first glockenspielist joins our little party, then his note will be mostly canceled - though a little bit will get through to contribute to the overall loudness.

"This effect is not the only one involved in our appreciation of loudness. If it was, 100 instruments would sound ten times as loud as one. But we perceive 100 instruments as being only four times as loud as one. This extra diminution in perceived loudness is the result of the way we humans are designed - so let's have a look at that.

"Why don't our brains add up sounds normally? The surprising answer is that our brains and ears add up sounds in an unusual way in order to help us stay alive. From the times of the earliest cavemen to the present day, we have used our ears to help us avoid danger. This is one of the main reasons we have ears in the first place (although they are also useful for supporting your sunglasses). To be effective, your ears have to be able to hear very quiet noises (like the sound of someone creeping up on you), but also they must not get damaged by loud noises (such as thunder). It wouldn't be any good if you had excellent hearing for quiet noises but your ears stopped working after the first loud noise you heard.

"Our ears are organized in such a way that quiet noises can be heard clearly but any increase in the volume of the noise has progressively less and less impact. This effect is also true of our other four senses: smell, taste, sight and touch. Six smelly socks aren't six times as smelly as one on its own (even though each of the socks is releasing the same amount of smell) and ten salted peanuts in your mouth aren't five times as salty as two of them (even though you now have five times as much salt on your tongue). If you light 100 candles one at a time in a dark room you get the same effect as you got with the [glockenspiels] - the first one makes the biggest difference and the eighty-seventh makes hardly any difference. If you are daft enough to stick a pin in your fingertip then it will hurt, but if you stick a second one in (next to the first one) the pain will not be doubled."

delanceyplace.com 3/21/11 - avoiding the word "genocide"

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - genocide has been commonplace throughout history, whether in the millennia before World War II, or in the decades after. But because of the thousands of stirring and right-minded Holocaust speeches promising "never again," politicians go to any length to avoid using the word "genocide" given the obligation it immediately creates. And so it was in 1992 in the disintegrated chaos of Yugoslavia where Serbs were massacring Bosnian Muslims:

"Almost from the start, [Newsday reporter Roy] Gutman's reporting had been well ahead of the curve. In early July, one of his stories on the deportation of Muslims from Bosnia to Hungary bore a particularly prophetic headline: 'Ethnic Cleansing: Yugoslavs Try to Deport 1,800 Muslims to Hungary.' That was just the beginning. Within a few days he got an emotional phone call from one of the Muslim leaders he had met earlier in Banja Luka: 'Please try to come here. There is a lot of killing. They are shipping Muslim people through Banja Luka in cattle cars. Last night there were twenty-five train wagons for cattle crowded with women, old people, and children. They were so frightened. In the name of humanity please come.' With that Gutman managed to get to Banja Luka, where he heard reports of concentration camps set up by the Serbs for Muslims in northern Bosnia, the worst of them at a place called Omarska, which was an open iron-mine pit north of Banja Luka. ...

"Gutman could not get to Omarska - the Serbs said they could not guarantee his safety - but a Serb official offered him another trip to a prisoner-of-war camp in a place called Manjaca. Gutman and his photographer and interpreter went there, and again the images - this time of emaciated men with shaved heads - were hauntingly similar to those from Nazi Germany. ...

"It was a struggle in the summer of 1992 to get the top people in the govermment even to admit that genocide was taking place in Bosnia. ...

"By chance, there was soon more graphic evidence of the death camps. A British television team had managed to work its way to Omarska and got some film clips. As one of the journalists on the team, Ed Vulliamy, later wrote of what he saw, 'Nothing could have prepared us for what we see when we come through the back gates of what was the Omarska iron mine and ore processing works. ... [The prisoners] run in single file across the courtyard and into the canteen. Above them in an observation post is the watchful eye, hidden behind reflective sunglasses, of a beefy guard who follows their weary canter with the barrel of his heavy machine gun. There are thirty of them running; their heads newly shaven, their clothes baggy over their skeletal bodies. Some are barely able to move. ... They line up in obedient and submissive silence and collect their ration: a meager, watery portion of beans augmented with bread crumbs and a stale roll. The men are at various stages of human decay and affliction; the bones of their elbows and wrists protrude like pieces of jagged stone from the pencil-thin stalks to which their arms have been reduced. Their skin is putrefied, the complexions of their faces debased, degraded, and utterly subservient, and yet they fix their huge hollow eyes on us with looks like the blades of knives. There is nothing quite like the sight of the prisoner desperate to talk and to convey some terrible truth that is so near yet so far, but who dares not.'

"One of the most intriguing things about that period, thought Richard Johnson, the Yugoslav desk officer, was the dance of nomenclature. Starting in the Bush years, but extending well into the Clinton years, an attempt was made to avoid or at least modify the G-word; that is, genocide. To admit outright that what the Serbs were doing was, in fact, genocidal was a critical decision because the need to act would be that much greater. The most inventive kind of descriptions were demanded, the use of words and phrases the like of which had not been seen around the department in years, perhaps since the early days of Vietnam when, in the face of continued terrible news about the war, the government had steadfastly announced that it was cautiously optimistic.

"Johnson noted that even when State Department spokesmen gradually began to edge toward saying how terrible it was in Bosnia, there were still gradations that allowed the press officers to stop short of calling it genocide. Certain acts, they said, could be described as 'tantamount to genocide.' Or they had 'bordered on genocide.' Or a particular act was genocidal, as if the sum of everything the Serbs were doing was not and there was a difference between an act of genocide and genocide itself."

delanceyplace.com 3/18/11 - the pain of exclusion

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:39:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - our need to matter and our need to belong are as fundamental as our need to eat and breathe. Therefore ostracism - rejection, silence, exclusion - is one of the most powerful punishments that one person can inflict on another. Brain scans have shown that this rejection is actually experienced as physical pain, and that this pain is experienced whether those that reject us are close friends or family or total strangers, and whether the act is overt exclusion or merely looking away. Most typically, ostracism causes us to act to be included again - to belong again - although not necessarily with the same group:

"Ostracism uniquely threatens all these needs. Even in a verbal or physical altercation, individuals are still connected. Total exclusion, however, severs all bonds. Social rejection also deals a uniquely harsh blow to self-esteem, because it implies wrongdoing. Worse, the imposed silence forces us to ruminate, generating self-deprecating thoughts in our search for an explanation. The forced isolation also makes us feet helpless: you can fight back, but no one will respond. Finally, ostracism makes our very existence feel less meaningful because this type of rejection makes us
feel invisible and unimportant. The magnitude of the emotional impact of ostracism even makes evolutionary sense. After all, social exclusion interferes not only with reproductive success but also with survival. People who do not belong are not included in collaborations necessary to obtain and share food and also lack protection against enemies.

delanceyplace.com 3/17/11 - truffles

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - truffles, the revered culinary delicacies, are symbiotic with trees and evolved their rich aromas as an enticement to foraging animals to aid in their spore disbursement:

"Throughout history, truffles have appeared on the menu and in folklore. The Pharaoh Khufu served them at his royal table. Bedouins, Kalahari Bushmen and Australian Aborigines have hunted them for countless generations in deserts. The Romans savored them and thought they were produced by thunder. Modern epicures prize truffles for their earthy aroma and flavor and are willing to pay steep prices at the market - recently more than $3000 per kilogram for the Italian white variety. Yet despite humanity's abiding interest in the fungi much about their biology has remained veiled in mystery. ...

"Truffles, like mushrooms, are the fruit of fungi. These fleshy organs are temporary reproductive structures that produce spores which eventually germinate and give rise to new offspring. What sets truffles apart from mushrooms is that their spore-laden fruit forms below ground rather than above. ...

"All truffles and mushrooms produce networks of filaments or hyphae that grow between plant rootlets to form a shared absorptive organ known as a mycorrhiza. Thus joined, the fungus provides the plant with precious nutrients and water its tiny hyphae able to reach into pockets of soil inaccessible to the plant's much larger roots. The plant in turn furnishes its consort with sugars and other nutrients that it generates through photosynthesis - products that the fungus needs but cannot produce on its own because it does not photosynthesize. So beneficial is this partnership that nearly all trees and other woody plants require it for survival, as do the associated fungi. Most herbaceous plants (those that do not have a permanent woody stem aboveground) form mycorrhizae too, albeit with different fungi. ...

"Given that truffles require aboveground dispersal of their spores to propagate, why would natural selection favor the evolution of species that hide underground? Consider the reproductive tactic of mushrooms. Mushrooms ... all have fruiting bodies that can discharge spores directly into the air. ... It is a highly effective approach.

"The mushroom strategy is not foolproof, however. Most mushrooms have little defense against environmental hazards such as heat, drying winds, frost and grazing animals. Every day a few spores mature and are discharged. But if inclement weather dries or freezes a mushroom spore, production usually grinds to a halt.

"Where such hazards are commonplace new evolutionary adaptations have arisen. The most successful alternative has been for the fungus to fruit underground. Once the soil is wet enough for the subterranean fruiting body to form it is insulated from vagaries of weather. The truffle develops with relative impunity, continuing to produce and nurture its spores even when aboveground conditions become intolerable to mushrooms. At first glance the truffle's solution might seem facile. The form of a truffle is visibly less complex than that of a mushroom. No longer does the fungus need to expend the energy required to push its spore-bearing tissues aboveground. The truffle is but a lump of spore-bearing tissue usually enclosed by a protective skin.

"The problem is that the truffles cannot themselves liberate their spores trapped as they are in their underground realm. That feat demands an alternative dispersal system. And therein lies the complexity of the truffle's scheme. Over millions of years as truffles retreated underground, mutations eventually led to the formation of aromatic compounds attractive to animals. Each truffle species has its own array of aromatics that are largely absent in immature specimens, but intensify and emerge as the spores mature. ... When an animal [is attracted by the aroma and] eats a truffle most of the flesh is digested but the spores pass through unharmed and are defecated on the ground where they can germinate if the conditions are right."

delanceyplace.com 3/16/11 - the military-industrial complex

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:16:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - three days before he departed the White House, Dwight Eisenhower gave a simple, short speech that has become regarded as one of our nation's finest. In it he noted that after each war that predated World War II, America's military had been significantly downsized if not effectively disbanded. After World War II, this policy changed, and for the first time America had a vast army in place during a time of peace. While reminding citizens that there would always be crises in the world, Eisenhower nevertheless expressed concern that this large military might exercise undue influence on U.S. policy, and further reminded the country that the military should be subject to the guidance of its citizenry. Though he had faced Adolf Hitler, he expressed a profound preference for "the conference table" as opposed to "the certain agony of the battlefield," and lived out this preference by resisting involvement He further expressed a concern about deficits, counseling that Americans "must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow." Here are brief passages from this speech:

"Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

"But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

"The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

"A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.. ...

"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

"Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

"Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield."

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delanceyplace.com 3/15/11 - the truth wears off

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:15:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - the truth wears off:

"On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.

"But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren't any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. 'In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,' John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

"Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it's known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It's a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

"But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades. For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to 'put nature to the question.' But it appears that nature often gives us different answers....

"[Joseph Banks Rhine, a psychologist at Duke, came to call this trend toward a reduction in the strength of proof for a theory he had developed in the early nineteen-thirties] the 'decline effect.'

"According to John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls 'significance chasing,' or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance - the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. 'The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,' Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.'

"The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong. 'It feels good to validate a hypothesis,' Ioannidis said. 'It feels even better when you've got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that's why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven' - he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins - 'you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect. They really want to believe that it's true.' ...

"The disturbing implication of a study [conducted in the late nineteen-nineties by John Crabbe, a neuroscientist at the Oregon Health and Science University] is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The problem, of course, is that ... dramatic findings are ... the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected. Grants get written, follow-up studies are conducted. The end result is a scientific accident that can take years to unravel.

"This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment - Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon - the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001....

"Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can't bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren't surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe."

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delanceyplace.com 3/14/11 - the exorcist

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:46:00 -0400

In today's excerpt - The Exorcist. William Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist, and the 1973 movie based on it, was about an actress's daughter wracked by involuntary convulsions and whose mother, when doctors prove powerless to treat her, resorts to the services of an exorcist. It exploded across the American scene in large part because it captured the trauma and profound unease of its time - intentionally reflecting such themes as Vietnam, campus dissent, the breakdown of the family and religion, the abortion debate, the Manson murders, and the Arab oil crisis:

"Critics from the Wall Street Journal to Moscow's Isvestia were appalled, but audiences were overwhelmed by the result. As newspapers reported viewers fainting, Americans lined up to see what all the fuss was about, and then queued to see it all again. ...

"By March 1974, the film had sold 6 million tickets in the United States and was poised to sweep the world. ... The scale of the reaction suggests that the film - like William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel of the same name, and on which it was based - had hit a nerve. The Exorcist touched on issues that were all too alive for the world of 1973. ...

"Blatty's novel is explicit about the manifestations of evil in the modern world. ... In late 1969 the world learned that American troops had massacred some 200 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. The war in Vietnam had become a perverse pseudo-industrial enterprise in which units were rewarded for their 'body count' like insurance salesmen reaching their targets. It was this aspect of the war that attracted Blatty's attention. His epigram for part three of his novel came from a 1969 edition of Newsweek: 'a [Vietnam] brigade commander once ran a contest to rack up his unit's 10,000th kill; the prize was a week of luxury in the colonel's own quarters.'

"The novel also alludes to what many Americans still regarded as the 'original sin' of the era: the murder of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In an early chapter the child Regan visits Kennedy's grave, and a Georgetown church, introduced as the site of JFK's marriage, is the scene of revolting desecrations (apparently perpetrated by Regan under demonic control). Blatty sought to draw these disparate manifestations of evil - crime, Communism, genocide, war and assassination - together into a cohesive presence. The demon of The Exorcist was the result. ...

"The screen adaptation of The Exorcist ... revolves around 'social evils', the foremost of these being inter-generational conflict. The Exorcist found the US divided as never before along generational lines. The world of the young, whose language and culture openly defied the past, was increasingly a closed book to older Americans. College campuses across the country had erupted in protests against the war in Vietnam, culminating in the shooting of protesters at Kent State University, Ohio, in May 1970. This background is evoked in early scenes of The Exorcist in which we learn that Regan's mother is an actress in a film portraying campus dissent. She is seen begging an angry crowd of students to 'work within the system'. The theme of a young girl's transformation into a demon-possessed beast played with America's growing fear of its youth. The girl is named Regan in an allusion to one of literature's original 'thankless children' in Shakespeare's King Lear. Yet the film also touches a second nerve: the guilt of the middle-aged over the neglect of their parents. The priest, Father Karras, is wracked by guilt after seeing his mother committed to a mental hospital. His guilt becomes a principal avenue of attack for the demon during their climactic confrontation. ...

"Blatty's story clearly reflects contemporary fears over the breakdown of the family. Regan is the child of a 'broken marriage'. Her mother is caught up in her career and alternates neglect with cloying over-compensation. The early manifestations of the demon as an 'imaginary friend' seem like a substitute for the girl's absent father. A different sort of Father restores the situation. Beyond this The Exorcist plays on the guilt of women moving into the work-place and 'usurping the masculine role'. To this end, the mother is given a male name: Chris. The events that follow beg to be read as a punishment for nothing more than being a woman of her time. ...

"The Exorcist also played on concerns over reproduction that had surfaced during the preceding decade. The 1960s had seen shocking images of birth defects resulting from the drug Thalidomide, sharpening fears of giving birth to the 'monstrous'; it had also seen an intense debate over the issue of abortion, which reached its climax in January 1973 with the Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Roe v. Wade. The murderous, possessed child Regan can be read as a projection of the guilt of a generation that had conceded that legal abortion was a necessity. The abortion debate had turned on the issue of a woman's right to control her own body. ...

"The use of Georgetown was significant. The district, close to the heart of Washington DC, was inseparable from American political power; a senator is among the guests at Chris's ritzy party. Chris and her circle add a cultural dimension to this power: her life is shown splashed on the cover of Photoplay magazine. The murder of film star Sharon Tate by Charles Manson in 1969 gave the 'evil hits Hollywood star' scenario a chilling topicality. Beyond this, an 'enemy within' the American movie industry was a favorite theme of isolationists before the Second World War and of anti-Communists after it. Blatty's story flirts with this same notion. Indeed, Father Merrin's warning to beware of the demon's voice as it mixes lies with truth is exactly the sort of thing President Nixon had begun to say about the American media as it probed the breaking story of Watergate. ...

"The Iraqi prologue ... anticipates a phobia that would become a fixed part of American popular culture from the 1970s onwards: fear of the Arab world. ... The release of The Exorcist coincided with a new low in US relations with that region. With Middle Eastern oil producers doubling prices overnight on December 23rd, 1973, it was already clear that more than one demon could be released from the sands of Arabia."

delanceyplace.com 3/11/11 - new york surrenders

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:29:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in 1664, four English ships led by Colonel Richard Nicolls sailed into Manhattan's harbor and took the city of New Amsterdam from Pieter Stuyvesant and the Dutch without firing a single shot. This was in spite of the fact that the Netherlands had among the most benevolent governments on earth towards its citizens, and in spite of the fact that the English were the bitter enemies of the Dutch. The reason? New Amsterdam was governed by the Dutch West India Company, not the government of the Netherlands. And that company, through the unyielding hand of Stuyvesant, ran New Amsterdam like the company outpost they intended it to be - allowing little freedom, no property rights, no representation in government and no freedom of religion. And so the people of New Amsterdam turned on their governor and welcomed the English:

"Stuyvesant then met with an English representative [of the invading army] at a popular local tavern and, after quietly reading the terms of surrender presented to him, tore the paper to shreds. This outraged the gathered [Dutch] crowd - onlookers who demanded that Stuyvesant relay the English offer to them. But that would have been too undignified for the man who had been in a struggle with these very people for years over the government of the settlements and colony. He refused to show the generous terms of surrender either to his subordinates or to the leading citizens of the settlement, knowing they would argue for surrender if he did - many of the terms on offer were the very things the people of New Netherland had been seeking for years: freedom of religion, property rights, inheritance laws, continued trade with Holland, 'every man in his Estate, life, and liberty.'

"Stuyvesant slowly collected the ripped pieces of the letter and offered the crumpled pieces to the mob. Many hands grabbed the pieces and glued them back together. Many eyes then squinted at the damaged handwriting, and some people read the words aloud. Stuyvesant stalked away on his stump leg, mounted the battlements of his fort and stared across the water at the ships that were waiting with their guns trained on the settlement. He let the wind ruffle his long hair and contemplated ordering one of his cannons to fire. The long-standing and accepted rules of war
allowed that if a stronghold surrendered when presented with a formal demand, the civilians would be spared and the town too; but, if even a single shot were fired in aggression, the community would be open for plunder and destruction. One shot from Stuyvesant's cannon, and the people would have to defend themselves - he could unleash a great torrent of violence that would surely result in the destruction of the town and the death of many people. ...

"The next morning, on September 5, 1664, ninety-three of the leading citizens of New Amsterdam presented Stuyvesant with a petition, signed by his own son, demanding that he surrender to prevent the inevitable 'misery, sorrow, conflagration, the dishonour of women, murder of children in their cradles, and, in a word, the absolute ruin and destruction of about fifteen hundred innocent souls.' Stuyvesant knew he had lost their loyalty.

The terms of surrender that Nicolls offered were shrewdly calculated to deflate any opposition to the foreign power. They were something the citizens had lacked under the West India Company's administration and feared they would never gain. The hated foreigners - enemies of Holland through several recent wars - offered the people of New Amsterdam if not a better life, at least a life of greater freedom. ... The citizens of Holland's premiere North American colony preferred conquest by a foreign nation, a nation with which they had been at war for decades, to fighting for their own country."

delanceyplace.com 3/10/11 - a human foot-stool

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:13:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - in the harsh and barren New Mexico territory a war between the Navajo and the invading Spaniards had been carried on since the Spaniards first started arriving in the 1500s and 1600s. This war was often a low-grade uneasy coexistence with parties on both sides raiding the other to steal sheep horses and people they kept as slaves. And so it still was when the Americans claimed the territory during the 1846 Mexican American War:

"[The new territory governor Charles Bent wrote that] 'The Navajos are an industrious, intelligent and warlike tribe ... numbering as many as 14,000 souls. They are the only Indians on the continent ... that are increasing in numbers. Their horses and sheep are said to be greatly superior to those raised by the New Mexicans. A large portion of their stock has been acquired by marauding expeditions against the settlements. ... They have in their possession many prisoners, men, women, and children, taken from the settlements of this Territory, whom they hold and treat as slaves.'

"Not that the New Mexicans had failed to find ways to make Navajo life miserable. They, too, stole Navajo sheep and horses and women and children. Although slavery was technically illegal anyone of means in the province had at least one or two Indian criados (servants), and a young Navajo woman was considered most valuable of all—in large part because of her assumed talent for weaving.

"There were slave markets in Taos and other towns where Indian servants could be purchased for a pittance. Often captives were sold in the town plazas on Sunday afternoons following mass. Other tribes that happened to be enemies of the [Navajo] came to understand their high market value, and so inevitably Navajo children in ever larger numbers would end up on the auctioning blocks. There was also a phenomenon known as the 'New Mexican Bachelor Party' in which a groom and a few of his swashbuckling friends would gamely push into Navajo country and go hunting for a few slaves to give to the bride on her wedding day to help her keep house. Professional slave raiders were part of the ordinary commerce of daily life.

"Remarked one disgusted traveler to Santa Fe: 'I have frequently seen little Indian children six years of age led around the country like beasts by a Mexican who had probably stolen them from their mother not more than a week before and offered for sale from forty to one hundred and twenty dollars.'

"Said Lewis Kennon, an American doctor well acqainted with life in New Mexico: 'I know of no family which can raise one hundred and fifty dollars but what purchases a Navajo slave. Many families own four or five—the trade in them being as regular as the trade in pigs or sheep.'

"It has been estimated that of the six thousand people then living in Santa Fe, at least five hundred were Indian slaves or peons. ...

"[In an 1846 ball to fete the American military conquerors Susan Magoffin] noted in her diary that the '[Santa Fe] ladies were all dressed in silks, satins, ginghams—and decked with showy ornaments, huge necklaces, countless rings. They had large sleeves, short waists, ruffled skirts. All danced and smoked cigarettos.' In one corner she was somewhat distressed to see a 'dark-eyed senora' from a well-to-do Spanish family who had brought along a 'human foot-stool' as Magoffin called it—an Indian servant crouched on the floor for her mistress to use, between dances, 'as an article of furniture.' "

delanceyplace.com 3/9/11 - servants, prostitutes, and karl marx

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:10:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the Industrial Revolution in England brought an explosion in population from eight million in 1800 to thirty million in 1900, the creation of massive new wealth, and the ascendance of England to global domination. It also brought unprecedented inequality and a profound dislocation in families and lives, as innovations in farming left thousands out of work and drew them to larger cities seeking employment. For some, that work was in the newly forming factories, for others it was work as servants and prostitutes. In fact, in the mid-1800s, one-third of all women in London age fifteen to twenty-five were servants, and another third were prostitutes. The veneer of prudishness and decorum we now refer to as "Victorian" was English society's way of denying and recoiling from the consequences of this dislocation and degradation:

"[A typical householder, Rector Thomas] Marsham, kept three servants: the housekeeper, Miss Worm; the village girl who worked as an underservant, Martha Seely; and a groom and gardener named James Baker. Like their master, all were unmarried. Three servants to look after one bachelor clergyman might seem excessive to us, but it wouldn't have seemed so to anyone in Marsham's day. Most rectors kept at least four servants, and some had ten or more. It was an age of servants. Households had servants the way modern people have appliances. Common laborers had servants. Sometimes servants had servants.

"Servants were more than a help and convenience; they were a vital indicator of status. Guests at dinner parties might find that they had been seated according to the number of servants they kept. People held on to their servants almost for dear life. Even on the American frontier and even after she had lost almost everything in a doomed business venture, Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, kept a liveried footman. Karl Marx, living in chronic indebtedness in Soho and often barely able to put food on the table, employed a housekeeper and a personal secretary. The household was so crowded that the secretary—a man named Pieper—had to share a bed with Marx. (Somehow, even so, Marx managed to put together enough private moments to seduce and impregnate the housekeeper, who bore him a son in the year of the Great Exhibition.)

"So servitude was a big part of life for a great many people. By 1851, one-third of all the young women in London—those aged from about fifteen to twenty-five—were servants. Another one in three was a prostitute. For many, that was about all the choice there was. The total number of servants in London, male and female, was greater than the total populations of all but the six largest English cities. Service was very much a female world. Females in service in 1851 outnumbered males by ten to one. For women, however, seldom was it a job for life. Most left the profession by the age of thirty-five, usually to get married, and very few stayed in any one job for more than a year or so. That is little wonder, as we shall see. Being a servant was generally hard and thankless work. ...

"Perhaps the hardest part of [being a servant] was simply being attached to and dependent on people who didn't think much of you. Virginia Woolf's diaries are almost obsessively preoccupied with her servants and the challenge of maintaining patience with them. Of one, she writes: 'She is in a state of nature: untrained; uneducated ... so that one sees a human mind wriggling undressed.' As a class they were as irritating as 'kitchen flies.' Woolf's contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay was rather more blunt: 'The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.' ...

"One handbook actually gave instructions—in fact, provided a working script—for how to humiliate a servant in front of a child, for the good of both child and servant. In this model scenario, the child is summoned to the study, where he finds his mother standing with the shamed servant, who is weeping quietly."

In today's excerpt - the Industrial Revolution in England brought an explosion in population from eight million in 1800 to thirty million in 1900, the creation of massive new wealth, and the ascendance of England to global domination. It also brought unprecedented inequality and a profound dislocation in families and lives, as innovations in farming left thousands out of work and drew them to larger cities seeking employment. For some, that work was in the newly forming factories, for others it was work as servants and prostitutes. In fact, in the mid-1800s, one-third of all women in London age fifteen to twenty-five were servants, and another third were prostitutes. The veneer of prudishness and decorum we now refer to as "Victorian" was English society's way of denying and recoiling from the consequences of this dislocation and degradation:

"[A typical householder, Rector Thomas] Marsham, kept three servants: the housekeeper, Miss Worm; the village girl who worked as an underservant, Martha Seely; and a groom and gardener named James Baker. Like their master, all were unmarried. Three servants to look after one bachelor clergyman might seem excessive to us, but it wouldn't have seemed so to anyone in Marsham's day. Most rectors kept at least four servants, and some had ten or more. It was an age of servants. Households had servants the way modern people have appliances. Common laborers had servants. Sometimes servants had servants.

"Servants were more than a help and convenience; they were a vital indicator of status. Guests at dinner parties might find that they had been seated according to the number of servants they kept. People held on to their servants almost for dear life. Even on the American frontier and even after she had lost almost everything in a doomed business venture, Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, kept a liveried footman. Karl Marx, living in chronic indebtedness in Soho and often barely able to put food on the table, employed a housekeeper and a personal secretary. The household was so crowded that the secretary - a man named Pieper - had to share a bed with Marx. (Somehow, even so, Marx managed to put together enough private moments to seduce and impregnate the housekeeper, who bore him a son in the year of the Great Exhibition.)

"So servitude was a big part of life for a great many people. By 1851, one-third of all the young women in London - those aged from about fifteen to twenty-five - were servants. Another one in three was a prostitute. For many, that was about all the choice there was. The total number of servants in London, male and female, was greater than the total populations of all but the six largest English cities. Service was very much a female world. Females in service in 1851 outnumbered males by ten to one. For women, however, seldom was it a job for life. Most left the profession by the age of thirty-five, usually to get married, and very few stayed in any one job for more than a year or so. That is little wonder, as we shall see. Being a servant was generally hard and thankless work. ...

"Perhaps the hardest part of [being a servant] was simply being attached to and dependent on people who didn't think much of you. Virginia Woolf's diaries are almost obsessively preoccupied with her servants and the challenge of maintaining patience with them. Of one, she writes: 'She is in a state of nature: untrained; uneducated ... so that one sees a human mind wriggling undressed.' As a class they were as irritating as 'kitchen flies.' Woolf's contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay was rather more blunt: 'The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.' ...

"One handbook actually gave instructions - in fact, provided a working script - for how to humiliate a servant in front of a child, for the good of both child and servant. In this model scenario, the child is summoned to the study, where he finds his mother standing with the shamed servant, who is weeping quietly."

Author: Bill Bryson
Title: At Home
Publisher: Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2010 by Bill Bryson
Pages: 87-88, 94-95

delanceyplace.com 3/8/11 - precision

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:29:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - though his personal life was in what seemed like perpetual disarray, Frank Sinatra developed a very precise sense of his music, and worked with increasing confidence to convey that sense:

"When he let himself go, as he did in the three up-tempo numbers he recorded in a remarkable July session orchestrated by George Siravo and the great Sy Oliver ('It All Depends on You,' 'Bye Bye Baby,' and 'Don't Cry Joe'), the results were thrilling. Lacquer-disc safety copies of the Sunday-evening session (Sinatra always preferred recording at night - 'The voice is better at night,' he was fond of saying), transcribed and analyzed by the Sinatra musicologist Charles L. Granata, have preserved Frank's obsessive pursuit of artistic perfection in exquisite detail:

"The recording date is July 10, 1949. As the evening session gets underway at Columbia's cavernous 30th Street Studio, Sinatra, arranger Sy Oliver, and conductor Hugo Winterhalter are auditioning a second instrumental run-through of George Siravo's arrangement of 'It All Depends on You.' Tonight's date will be jazz-flavored, the orchestra really a big 'band' - no strings. Amid the chatter and bustle on the studio floor, the vocalist, listening intently to a passage by the brass section, feels that something is amiss ...

" 'I'd like to hear the introduction, with the muted brass,' he instructs the conductor. The musicians comply, and the brief section is played for his approval. After hearing the passage, Sinatra carefully instructs both the musicians and the engineers: 'I'd like to get that as tight as we can. Trombones: you may have to turn around and face the microphone or something. I'd like to hear the six of you, as a unit,' he says. The engineer brings down a microphone with two sides, to help capture the precise tonal quality that Sinatra desires. The section played through again, the singer continues. 'Just once more, Hugo, and would you use less volume in the reeds, with the clarinet lead~ And would you play it lightly, trumpets and trombones, if you don't mind? I mean softly," he emphasizes.

"The trombone problem rectified, Sinatra, now in the booth, turns his attention to the rhythm section. He inquires of drummer Terry Snyder: 'You got enough pad on the bass drum? It booms a little bit.' Then, without the slightest hesitation, he turns to the studio prop men. 'Would you put in a small piece of carpet, enough to cover the entire bottom of the drum?' Satisfied, he addresses the pianist. 'Say, Johnny Guarneri, would you play something, a figure or something, and have the rhythm fall in? We'd like to get a small balance on it.' Guarneri begins an impromptu riff on the melody, as bassist Herman 'Trigger' Alpert, drummer Snyder, and guitarist Al Caiola join in. After a few moments, Sinatra's directions continue. 'Bass and guitar: Trig, can you move in about a foot or so, or you can pull the mike out if you wish. And the guitar-also move in a little closer. just a sbade-uh, uh, uh-that's enough.'

"This was no mere voice: this was a great artist in full command his powers and the means required to convey his art."

delanceyplace.com 3/7/11 - george bush, the father

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:14:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - George H. W. Bush, whose popularity rose to virtually unprecedented heights after presiding over the victorious first Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., nevertheless lost his re-election bid in 1992 for his seeming neglect of the domestic economy. It brought to mind Winston Churchill's shocking election loss to Clement Attlee after leading Britain to victory over Hitler in World War II, and led to Bill Clinton's giddy election mantra - 'it's the economy, stupid':

"The different pollsters tracking George Bush in the period after the Gulf War, from March until well into the fall of 1991, found a steady decline in the president's approval ratings, a decline, depending on the pollster, of some twenty or twenty-five percentage points. That was bad enough, but it was relatively easy to justify—after all, his ratings at the moment of victory in the desert had been almost unconscionably high. What went up that high certainly had to come down. Much more alarming was that people were again becoming mutinous over the economy, even as the aura of good feeling about the Gulf War was beginning to vanish.

"The White House, for a variety of reasons, tended to cut itself off from that ominous trend. [RNC pollster Fred] Steeper's polls and those of other pollsters showed that much of the country, perhaps as many as 80 percent of those polled, thought the country was in a recession. But the president's economic advisers—Michael Boskin, who was the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, effectively Bush's own personal economist; Dick Darman, his budget director; and Nick Brady, his secretary of the treasury—all told him that the recession was over. Some of his political people were furious with that stance; they thought the economists were dead wrong and were underestimating a potentially destructive political issue in order to justify their past advice. Nonetheless, Bush, in the fall of 1991, went public and declared that the recession was over. That was a critical mistake; it put him in direct conflict with the way a vast majority of Americans felt on an issue that was growing ever more serious in the public mind.

"This was the predicament of the Bush White House at the end of 1991. It had been Bush's best year in office, yet a powerful political current was beginning to work against him. Furthermore, he was being given little credit for his considerable skill in negotiating the end of the Cold War. In fact, the end of the Cold War was now possibly also working against him, as the release from Cold War tensions accelerated the change in the primacy of issues, from foreign affairs, where the Republicans in general and Bush in particular had been the beneficiaries, to domestic affairs, at a time when the economy was soft and the chief beneficiaries on economic issues were the Democrats.

"Among the first to spot this change was Fred Steeper. In December 1991, at exactly the time when the Soviet Union was breaking up and a once-feared adversary was losing its strength, he was holding a series of focus groups with ordinary citizens, trying to figure out how they felt about the issues that would face the Republican Party in the upcoming election year. The results were deadly. Not only was the primary issue the economy, not only did most ordinary people feel the country was mired deep in a recession, in contrast to what the president and his economic advisers were saying, but they were furious with Bush, who, they believed, was not that interested in them and their problems. Even more devastating, there were signs that it was already too late for him to right himself on this issue.

"Because of these findings Steeper wrote a memo for his boss, Bob Teeter, suggesting the possibility of what he termed the Churchill Factor or the Churchill Parallel. At the end of July 1945, just after Germany had surrendered, a tired England had not even waited for the war to end in the Pacific before voting out Winston Churchill, its gallant and beloved wartime leader, whose bulldog determination had symbolized England's strength and faith during Europe's darkest hour, and replacing him with the obviously less charismatic Labor Party leader, Clement Attlee. (He is a modest man and has much to be modest about, Churchill once said of Attlee.) The British had believed that Churchill's primary passion was defense and foreign policy, not domestic affairs, and they wanted someone who they thought would pay more attention to their postwar needs."

delanceyplace.com 3/4/11 - "the book that changed my life"

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:22:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - William Kamkwamba, a Malawian inventor, speaker and author. He gained fame in his country when, in 2002, at the age of fourteen, he built a windmill to power a few electrical appliances in his family's house in Masitala using blue gum trees, bicycle parts, and materials collected in a local scrapyard. Since then, he has built a solar-powered water pump that supplies the first drinking water in his village and two other windmills and is planning two more, including one in Lilongwe, the political capital of Malawi. As the son of a subsistence farmer in his poverty-ravaged African country, his family's house had no electricity or running water, and he could not afford to go to school after famine left his family destitute. Then he stumbled upon the book that changed his life:

"Most students at Kachokolo Secondary and Wimby Primary stopped going to school during the famine. After I dropped out ... fewer and fewer classmates showed up. The teachers would call recess around 9 A.M. and then disappear themselves into the fields and trading center to search for food. By February there was no school at all.

"But as the dowe and pumpkins became ready ... students began returning to school and classes resumed ... because my family still couldn't afford my school fees, I was forced to stay home doing nothing.

"I remembered that the previous year a group called the Malawi Teacher Training Activity had opened a small library in Wimbe Primary School that was stocked with books donated by the American Government. Perhaps reading could keep my brain from getting soft while being a drop out.

"The library was in a small room near the main office. A woman was sitting behind a desk when I walked in. She smiled, 'Come to borrow some books?' she said. This was Mrs. Edith Sikelo, a teacher at Wimbe who taught English and social studies and also operated the library. I nodded yes, then asked, 'What are the rules of this place?' I'd never used such a facility.

"Mrs. Sikelo took me behind a curtain to a smaller room, where three floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with books. It smelled sweet and musty, like nothing I'd ever encountered. I took another deep breath. Mrs. Sikelo then explained the rules for borrowing books and showed me the collection. I'd expected to find nothing but primary readers and textbooks, boring things. But to my surprise, I saw American textbooks on Eng¬lish, history, and science; secondary texts from Zambia and Zimba¬bwe; and novels for leisurely reading.

"I spent the day combing through the books while Mrs. Sikelo graded papers at her desk. Despite the variety of titles, I left that afternoon with books on geography, social studies, and basic spell¬ing - the same textbooks my friends were studying in school. It was the end of the term, and my hope was to get caught up before classes started again.

"At home I planted a thick blue gum pole deep in the ground near the mango tree out front, then made my own hammock out of knotted maize sacks. For the next three weeks, I began a rigorous course in independent study, visiting the library in the mornings, and spending the afternoons reading in the shade. ...
After about a month, the school term finally ended and [my friend] Gil¬bert was free to hang out. One morning we went to the library to kill some time - we often stayed for hours, just sitting in chairs and reading-but today Mrs. Sikelo was in a rush.

" 'You boys spend hours in here taking my time,' she said, 'but today I have an appointment. Just find something quickly.'

" 'Yes, Madame.'

"The reason it took so long was that none of the books were arranged properly. The titles weren't shelved alphabetically, or by sub¬ject or author, which meant we had to scan every title to find some¬thing we liked. So that day while Gilbert and I looked for a good read, I remembered an English word I'd stumbled across in one of my books.

" 'Gilbert, what's the word grapes mean?'

" 'Hmmm' he said, never heard of it. 'Look it up in the dictionary.'

"The English-Chichewa dictionaries were actually kept on the bottom shelf, but I never really spent much time looking down there. Instead I asked Mrs. Sikelo. So I squatted down to grab one of the Dictionaries, and when I did, I noticed a book I'd never seen, pushed into the shelf and slightly concealed. 'What is this?' I thought. Pulling it out, I saw it was an American textbook called Using Energy, and this book has since changed my life.

"The cover featured a long row of windmills - though at the time I had no idea what a windmill was. All I saw were tall white towers with three blades spinning like a giant fan. They looked like the pin¬wheel toys Geoffrey and I once made as kids when we were bored. We'd find old water bottles people threw away in the trading center, cut the plastic into blades like a fan, then put a nail through the cen¬ter attached to a stick. When the wind blew, they would spin. That's it, just a stupid pinwheel.

"But the fans on this book were not toys. They were giant beauti¬ful machines that towered into the sky, so powerful that they made the photo itself appear to be in motion. I opened the book and began to read."

delanceyplace.com 3/3/11 - extramarital sex

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - data on extramarital sex from Jared Diamond, UCLA professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and winner of the National Medal of Science:

"People have many reasons to lie when asked whether they have committed adultery. That's why it is notoriously difficult to get accurate scientific information about this important subject. One of the few existing sets of hard facts emerged as a totally unexpected by-product of a medical study performed nearly a half a century ago for a different reason. That study's findings have never been revealed until now.

"I recently learned those facts from the distinguished medical scientist who ran the study. (Since he does not wish to be identified in this connection I shall refer to him as Dr. X.) In the 1940s, Dr. X was studying the genetics of human blood groups which are molecules we acquire only by inheritance. ... The study's research plan was straightforward: go to the obstetrics ward of a highly respectable U.S. hospital; collect blood samples from one thousand newborn babies and their mothers and fathers; identify the blood groups in all the samples; and then use standard genetic reasoning to deduce the inheritance patterns.

"To Dr. X's shock, the blood groups revealed that nearly 10 percent of those babies to be the fruits of adultery! ... There could be no question of mistaken maternity: the blood samples were drawn from an infant and its mother soon after the infant emerged from its mother. A blood group present in a baby but absent from its undoubted mother could only have come from its father. Absence of the blood group from the mother's husband as well showed conclusively that the baby had been sired by some other man extramaritally. The true incidence of extramarital sex must have been considerably higher than 10 percent ... since most bouts of intercourse do not result in conception.

"At the time Dr. X made his discovery, research on American sexual habits was virtually taboo. He decided to maintain a prudent silence, never publishing his findings, and it was only with difficulty that I got his permission to mention his results without betraying his name. However, his results were later confirmed by several similar genetic studies whose results did get published. Those studies variously showed between 5 and 30 percent of American and British babies to have been adulterously conceived. Again, the proportion of the tested couples of whom at least the wife had practiced adultery must have been higher for the same ... reasons as in Dr. X's study."

delanceyplace.com 3/2/11 - the impostor phenomenon

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:25:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the impostor phenomenon:

"[A significant number of individuals who achieve at a a high level nevertheless] see themselves as frauds. Psychologists call this the impostor phenomenon. Those who are afflicted believe that their successes cannot be attributed to their own abilities. Instead they are convinced that other people's praise and recognition of their accomplishments are the result of charm, deception or simple good luck. Interestingly, such thoughts tend to surface in people whose lives have been an apparently uninterrupted string of successes.

"Many people have a tendency to blame external circumstances for their own accomplishments or failures. But those plagued with impostor thinking go well beyond this. They actually view themselves as swindlers who cheat their way into success without in any way having earned it. They live in constant terror of being exposed.

"Recently researchers have been taking a closer look at the emotional characteristics of people plagued by such ideas. By better understanding how the impostor phenomenon differs from related mental states such as social anxiety, depression and low self-esteem, psychologists are learning how to help people recognize and dispel the troubling thought that they are nothing but phonies.

"The term 'impostor phenomenon' was coined in the 1970s by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, both then at Georgia State University. Clance and Imes noticed that many of their students with excellent test scores and good grades admitted during counseling that they felt they did not belong at the school. Although these students were successful and accomplished, they expressed the idea that they had somehow conned their way into their current positions. They were astutely aware of their weaknesses and tended to overestimate the strengths and abilities of others. In their minds, they always failed to measure up - and they dreaded the day they would make a mistake and reveal to the world the grand illusion.

"Clance and Imes described this impostor phenomenon in a 1978 paper, taking care not to call it a 'syndrome' or a 'disorder,' because it is not a debilitating medical condition. Still, such thinking can be persistently troubling for those who suffer from it, and it may even keep some people from fulfilling their potential or finding contentment.

"In 1985, after further studying the associated feelings and ideas, Clance developed a questionnaire to help individuals determine if they show an impostorlike pattern of thinking. The test, widely used today by counselors and psychotherapists, covers the three main components of such thinking: feeling like a fake, discounting praise and achievements, and attributing successes to luck. The first component, feeling fake, is the core of impostordom. People feel that they have pulled the wool over everyone's eyes - that they are not really as smart, talented or hardworking as they have convinced everyone they are. The second facet is the inability to acknowledge praise or good performance, which means that even after working hard and achieving a goal, these so-called impostors will ignore the fact of their success and continue to focus on their perceived weaknesses. And finally, when faced with their own conspicuous achievements, sufferers will attribute their good fortune to chance or some other external factor rather than taking credit for it. ...

"[Some,] to ensure that their 'failure' is not uncovered in a performance situation, such people may avail themselves of two seemingly opposite strategies: overdoing and underdoing. Overdoing involves disproportionate efforts such as studying and restudying material they have already mastered or obsessively preparing and practicing every detail of a short, routine presentation [or task]."

delanceyplace.com 3/1/11 - the dutch dominate

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Florence led the Renaissance and was at the forefront of European commerce and ideas. But the trial of Galileo, a showpiece of the Counter-Reformation, ended that, and scientists and commercial adventurers knew they had to leave the Italian peninsula for a more tolerant home. That home was the Netherlands - a bastion for freedom in science, commerce and thought. As the best migrated to the Netherlands, that country parlayed its freedom and intellectual energy into global leadership, becoming the wealthiest and most advanced country in the world, replacing Florence and overshadowing England and France. The key engine of its wealth was a domination of world shipping trade, and in particular, its dominance of the spice trade - pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon - the rare east Asian spices which were perhaps the most valuable commodities in the world:

"In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Netherlands was arguably the wealthiest and most scientifically advanced of the European nations. This period, known as the Dutch Golden Age, brought a flourishing of the arts and sciences that reflected the period's unbounded optimism and affluence. Prosperous burghers and merchants became patrons of the arts, including sculpture, poetry and drama, and of public debates. They commissioned architects to design beautiful houses. Paintings and sculptures adorned the interior walls of these impressive homes. Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Jacob van Ruisdael and many others revolutionized painting, infusing new life into landscapes, portraiture and still life, as well as portraying contemporary life and society in the flourishing cities that were the most cosmopolitan in Europe.

"In science, the list of internationally prominent luminaries included the philosopher Rene Descartes; acclaimed jurist and theorist of international law Hugo Grotius; mathematician, astronomer and inventor of the pendulum clock Christiaan Huygens; and Anton van Leeuwenhoek, ... founder of the study of microbiology. Book publishing flourished in the climate of tolerance and intellectual curiosity; ideas concerning religion, philosophy and science that were considered too controversial in other nations found their way into print in the Netherlands, and the books were secretly shipped abroad.

"The Dutch Republic, newly freed from Spanish domination and relishing its freedom, was admirably situated to dominate European trade by providing an artery into the interior. Thousands of ships crowded its many harbours. The great city of Amsterdam was the centre of the international trade in the exotic luxuries of the Americas, India and the 'Spice Islands.' The Amsterdam stock exchange, founded in 1602, was the world's first, created by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) for dealing in its own stocks and bonds. The VOC was the first-ever trading company with a permanent share capital. This joint stock company attracted huge wealth in initial capitalization from over 1,800 investors, most of whom were merchants and other wealthy middle-class citizens, and the speculation on the fluctuating value of these shares relied on the success or failure of the company's ships in bringing spices back to Europe from the Far East.

"The first great global corporation, the VOC was by the late seventeenth century the most powerful and richest company in the world. Its private fleet boasted nearly 150 merchant ships and 40 giant warships. At the height of its power, it employed nearly 50,000 people worldwide - seamen, artisans, stevedores, labourers, clerks and builders. The company was involved in a multitude of commercial activities, such as construction, sugar refining, cloth manufacturing, tobacco curing, weaving, glass making, distilling, brewing and other industries related to its global business enterprises. The payroll also included a 10,000-man private army.

"The VOC, one of the foundations of Dutch prosperity and with its mighty fleet a key force propelling the young republic to look to the world for commerce, held a virtual monopoly over the global spice supply."

delanceyplace.com 2/28/11 - escape to canada

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - for American blacks in the decades following the American Revolution, even in the northern states, life was so oppressive that leaders from among them determined to emigrate and establish colonies in foreign countries. One of the first places they considered was Canada. Ultimately, a colony was established in Africa and 13,000 emigrated there:

"In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the role of free African- Americans in the life of the country was an issue that engaged whites and blacks alike. Concerned that free men of color could never achieve equality in the United States, a young free black man named Hezekiel Grice of Baltimore wrote to a number of prominent black leaders proposing a convention where mass emigration to Canada would be discussed. On September 15, 1830, a
ten-day National Negro Convention began in Philadelphia at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Forty black men from nine states attended, including Mother Bethel Bishop Richard Allen.

"Opposition to the African colonization effort was a primary impetus for the call for a National Negro Convention. The American Colonization Society was formed in 1816 to implement a plan to establish a colony for free blacks in Africa. Dominated by slaveholders, the Colonization Society also included some African-Americans and abolitionists. Ultimately, that group sent 13,000 blacks to establish Liberia [on the west coast of Africa] in 1821. In contrast, the result of the National Negro Convention was a new association, the American Society of Free People of Colour, dedicated to improving the condition of blacks in North America, by purchasing land and by encouraging free blacks to emigrate to a new settlement in Canada. Members of the American Society of Free People of Colour argued that civic freedoms were already available in Canada. Further, its customs, language, climate, and soil were similar to those in America, and land could be purchased cheaply.

"Richard Allen was elected president of the society, calling on free men 'to aid each other by all honorable means, and to plant and support one in that country.' Allen also appealed to 'our colored brethren, and to all philanthropists here and elsewhere, to assist in this benevolent and important work.' Conventions similar to the first national meeting in Philadelphia in 1830 were held through the 1840s in New York and other states, but the movement eventually faded. Although many African-Americans immigrated to Canada, particularly after the Fugitive Slave Act was enacted in 1857, a specific colony in Canada was never established."

Author: Laura E. Beardsley
Title: The Philadelphia Citizen's Almanac
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Date: Copyright 2010 by Turner Publishing Company
Pages: 294In today's excerpt - for American blacks in the decades following the American Revolution, even in the northern states, life was so oppressive that leaders from among them determined to emigrate and establish colonies in foreign countries. One of the first places they considered was Canada. Ultimately, a colony was established in Africa and 13,000 emigrated there:

"In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the role of free African- Americans in the life of the country was an issue that engaged whites and blacks alike. Concerned that free men of color could never achieve equality in the United States, a young free black man named Hezekiel Grice of Baltimore wrote to a number of prominent black leaders proposing a convention where mass emigration to Canada would be discussed. On September 15, 1830, a
ten-day National Negro Convention began in Philadelphia at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Forty black men from nine states attended, including Mother Bethel Bishop Richard Allen.

"Opposition to the African colonization effort was a primary impetus for the call for a National Negro Convention. The American Colonization Society was formed in 1816 to implement a plan to establish a colony for free blacks in Africa. Dominated by slaveholders, the Colonization Society also included some African-Americans and abolitionists. Ultimately, that group sent 13,000 blacks to establish Liberia [on the west coast of Africa] in 1821. In contrast, the result of the National Negro Convention was a new association, the American Society of Free People of Colour, dedicated to improving the condition of blacks in North America, by purchasing land and by encouraging free blacks to emigrate to a new settlement in Canada. Members of the American Society of Free People of Colour argued that civic freedoms were already available in Canada. Further, its customs, language, climate, and soil were similar to those in America, and land could be purchased cheaply.

"Richard Allen was elected president of the society, calling on free men 'to aid each other by all honorable means, and to plant and support one in that country.' Allen also appealed to 'our colored brethren, and to all philanthropists here and elsewhere, to assist in this benevolent and important work.' Conventions similar to the first national meeting in Philadelphia in 1830 were held through the 1840s in New York and other states, but the movement eventually faded. Although many African-Americans immigrated to Canada, particularly after the Fugitive Slave Act was enacted in 1857, a specific colony in Canada was never established."

Author: Laura E. Beardsley
Title: The Philadelphia Citizen's Almanac
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Date: Copyright 2010 by Turner Publishing Company
Pages: 294

delanceyplace.com 2/25/11 - swooning teenage girls

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - a very young Frank Sinatra already had the teenage girls screaming and swooning at his concerts when, in 1943, he hired the best publicist in show business - George Evans. Evans saw that the crowds were hysterical, but not choreographed to his liking - so he took it upon himself to take Sinatra's crowds to a new level:

"[After watching his new client perform in four consecutive shows at the Paramount Theater, George Evans] noticed - because each audience, after all, is a different animal - that not every show was successfully hysterical. Sometimes there were odd lulls in the tumult; sometimes the crowd got in its own way (and the singer's), just screaming, creating a massive wall of sound, preventing Sinatra from doing what he did best: singing. Pandemonium was all well and good if it served the purpose at hand -- namely, making this boy a star like no other before him. ...

"George would have to be ... skillful in working his new client. He had read how farmers would pay a pilot to go up and scatter certain chemicals on clouds to end a drought - seeding the clouds, they called it. Well, if clouds could be seeded, why not crowds? Rumor had it that [Sinatra's former publicist] Milt Rubin had handed out half-dollars in the Paramount lobby to girls who promised to make a racket during Sinatra's shows. It was the right idea, Evans felt, but unscientific in approach. ...

" 'George was a genius,' said Jerry Lewis, who, along with his partner, Dean Martin, was represented by Evans in the late 1940s. 'He would audition girls for how loud they could scream! Then he would give each of them a five-dollar bill - no dirty money, just clean new bills; I learned that from him. The agreement was that they had to stay at least five shows. Then he spread them through the Paramount - seven sections. Evans would read the scores of the songs to see where the screaming should come in - the girls could only scream on the high, loud parts, never when it was low and sexy.'

"The publicist would even take groups of girls to the basement to rehearse them, giving them precise cues when to yell 'Oh, Frankie! Oh, Frankie!' - not just during the loud parts, but whenever Sinatra let his voice catch. Evans also coached the singer. Picking up on Sinatra's intimate relationship with the microphone, Evans told him: Imagine that mike on its stand is a beautiful broad. Caress it. Make love to it. Hold on to it for dear life.

"Sinatra looked impressed: the guy was good. ...

"The publicist even trained both the singer and his claques in the art of call-and-response. When Sinatra sang '(I Got a Woman Crazy for Me) She's Funny That Way,' with the lyric 'I'm not much to look at, nothin' to see,' Evans coached one of the girls to yell 'Oh, Frankie, yes, you are!' On 'Embraceable You,' Evans told Frank to spread his arms beckoningly on the words 'Come to papa, come to papa, do.' The girls could then scream, 'Oh, Daddy!' After which, Frank would murmur into the mike, 'Gee, that's a lot of kids for one fellow.' Evans trained some of the girls to faint in the aisles, others to moan loudly in unison. He hired an ambulance to park outside the theater and issued the ushers bottles of ammonia 'in case a patron feels like swooning.' "

delanceyplace.com 2/24/11 - maidservants

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the maidservant:

"The life of a maidservant in early modern England was one fraught with perils with young girls often prey to the advances of their masters. In 1693 the London newspaper The Athenian Mercury carried the story of a manservant who, with his employer's active encouragement, married a maidservant in the same household, only to discover that she was already pregnant with the master's child. The employer said he was grateful to have 'such cracked ware [taken] off his hands' and gave financial compensation to the couple. Most maids made pregnant by their employers were not so fortunate.

"Servant-keeping was a ubiquitous and defining feature of society in the 16th to 18th centuries - around 60 to 70 per cent of 15 to 24-year-olds, the majority of them female, were employed in domestic service even in poor households as pauper servants. Most of them lived worked and slept in close proximity to their employers, sometimes in the same room. Privacy even in great houses with features such as corridors and backstairs was often impossible to achieve. Poverty was an endemic aspect of life in service. There were many like the 'poor maid' in a 1567 Canterbury court case who possessed 'nothing but her personal apparel and 16 shillings a year wages and no other goods.'

"Maidservants therefore were often precariously positioned both physically and economically. This made them sexually vulnerable to the whims of their masters and other men of the house as well as to lodgers, guests, manservants, and apprentices. Some would-be maidservants newly arrived in London were procured by pimps or by patrons of disreputable labor exchanges almost as soon as they set foot in the capital.

"There were maidservants too who exploited their sexuality to gain advantage. An early 17th-century Somerset maid giving evidence in a court case unwittingly revealed she was flattered when she attracted the advances of her employer and 'did not tell her dame because her master promised her new clothes.' Much later in the following century Jonathan Swift in his satirical Advice to Servants (Dublin 1745) advised housemaids on how to strike the best bargain when their sexual favors were solicited by their masters. At all costs, Swift urged the eldest son of the house should be avoided 'since you will get nothing from him but a big belly or a clap and probably both together.' In 1763, Mary Brown a maidservant in Glamorganshire, was still blackmailing Dr Morgan, her former employer, who had fathered her illegitimate child six or seven years previously.

"Church court records are filled with cases involving illicit sexual relations between master and servant. At the beginning of the 17th century, Edward Glascocke from Enfield, Middlesex found himself in court since he had been discovered in bed with his maidservant as well as his wife. In the same period church wardens in Stoke St. Mary, Somerset were scandalized by disclosures of an employer's open preference for his maidservant over his wife. When they went to work in the fields the maid rode on horseback, while the humbled wife was made to walk. The master and maidservant slept in the same bedroom while the mistress of the house was consigned to another. In Glamorganshire in 1763, the death of a master produced revelations about his 'vile life' in keeping a maidservant as his concubine 'to the great disturbance of his house and to the great grief and vexation of his loving wife.' A London moralist J. Moir warned parents in 1787: 'You had better turn your daughter into the street at once than place her out to service. For ten to one her master shall seduce her or she shall be made the confidante of her mistress's intrigues.'

"Masters would often consider it their right to molest their maids. It was made clear to a London maidservant in 1605 that providing sexual favors to the master on demand was simply part of her job. She was told: 'Thou art my servant and I may do with thee as I please.' "

delanceyplace.com 2/23/11 - grief and laughter

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - resilience in the face of trauma. One of the most active areas of psychological research is to determine how people cope with trauma, and what characteristics enable some people to move successfully past grief while others remain mired in it:

"Behavioral scientists have accumulated decades of data on both adults and children exposed to trauma. George A. Bonanno of Teachers College at Columbia University has devoted his career as a psychologist to documenting the varieties of resilient experience, focusing on our reactions to the death of a loved one and to what happens in the face of war, terror and disease. In every instance, he has found, most people adapt surprisingly well to whatever the world presents; life returns to a measure of normalcy in a matter of months. ...

"Bonanno started researching how we respond emotionally to bereavement and other traumatic events in the early 1990s while at the University of California, San Francisco. In those days, the prevailing wisdom held that the loss of a close friend or relative left indelible emotional scars - and Freudian grief work or a similar tonic was needed to return the mourner to a normal routine. Bonanno and his colleagues approached the task with open minds. Yet, again and again during the experiments, they found no trace of psychic wounds, raising the prospect that psychological resilience prevails, that it was not just a rare occurrence in in- dividuals blessed with propitious genes or gifted parents. This insight also raised the unsettling prospect that latter-day versions of grief work might end up producing more harm than good.

"In one example of his work, Bonanno and his colleague Dacher Keltner analyzed facial expressions of people who had lost loved ones recently. The videos bore no hint of any permanent sorrow that needed extirpation. As expected, the videos revealed sadness but also anger and happiness. Time and again, a grief-stricken person's expression would change from dejection to laughter and back.

"Were the guffaws genuine, the researchers wondered? They slowed down the video and looked for contraction of the orbicularis oculi muscles around the eyes - movements known as Duchenne expressions that confirm that laughs are what they seem, not just an artifact of a polite but insincere titter. The mourners, it turns out, exhibited the real thing. The same oscillation between sadness and mirth repeated itself in study after study.

"What does it mean? Bonanno surmises that melancholy helps us with healing after a loss, but unrelenting grief, like clinical depression, is just too much to bear, overwhelming the mourner. So the wiring inside our heads prevents most of us from getting stuck in an inconsolable psychological state. If our emotions get either too hot or cold, a kind of internal sensor - call it a 'resilience-stat' - returns us to equilibrium.

"Bonanno expanded his studies beyond bereavement. At Catholic University and later Columbia, he interviewed survivors of sexual abuse, New Yorkers who had gone through the 9/11 attacks and Hong Kong residents who had lived through the SARS epidemic. Wherever he went, the story was the same: 'Most of the people looked like they were coping just fine.'

"A familiar pattern emerged. In the immediate aftermath of death, disease or disaster, a third to two thirds of those surveyed experienced few, if any, symptoms that would merit classification as trauma: sleeping difficulties, hypervigilance or flashbacks, among other symptoms. Within six months the number that remained with these symptoms often fell to less than 10 percent."

delanceyplace.com 2/22/11 - uprisings in the middle east

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:27:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and other countries in the Middle East and Africa are instructively similar to a wave of uprising that occurred in 1848 in Europe - beginning in France and quickly spreading throughout the continent. That year turned out to be one of the most pivotal in the history of Europe. It was a time when almost every country was still a monarchy, and even in England, where a constitutional monarchy limited the power of the king, the government was not yet a democracy, and lordships and heredity still held sway. And so across Europe there were violent upheavals as the people, fueled by poverty and stoked by the more rapid communications possible in the wake of the industrial revolution, sought a voice and vote in the governance of their countries. Most of those uprisings fell short of their objectives. But they were harbingers of the demise of monarchy in Europe that came in succeeding generations. Ultimately, the question was not whether monarchy would survive, but rather which form of government would replace it - and the competition was between inchoate forms of democracy and socialism:

"In 1848 a violent storm of revolutions tore through Europe. With an astounding rapidity crowds of working-class radicals and middle-class liberals in Paris, Milan, Venice, Naples, Palermo, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Krakow and Berlin toppled the old regimes and began the task of forging a new liberal order. Political events so dramatic had not been seen in Europe since the French Revolution Of 1789 - and would not be witnessed again until the revolutions of Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 or perhaps the less far-reaching Bolshevik Revolution Of 1917. ... The brick-built authoritarian edifice that had imposed itself on Europeans for almost two generations folded under the weight of the insurrections. ...

"For the Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Croats and Serbs, the year was to be the 'Springtime of Peoples', a chance to assert their own sense of national identity and to gain political recognition. In the cases of the Germans and the Italians, it was an opportunity for national unification under a liberal or even democratic order. Nationalism therefore was one issue that came frothing to the surface of European politics in 1848. While rooted in constitutionalism and civil rights it was a nationalism that ominously made little allowance for the legitimacy of claims of other national groups. In many places, such narrowness of vision led to bitter ethnic conflict which in the end helped to destroy the revolutionary regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. ...

"The revolutions were scarred almost everywhere by a bitter often violent political polarization. Moderates wanted parliamentary government - but not necessarily to enfranchise everyone - and they were challenged by radicals who wanted democracy - frequently combined with dramatic social reform - without delay. ...

"A third issue that came boiling to the surface in 1848 and never left the European political agenda was the 'social question.' The abject misery of both urban and rural people had loomed menacingly in the thirty or so years since the Napoleonic Wars. The poverty was caused by a burgeoning population which was not yet offset by a corresponding growth in the economy. Governments however did little to address the social distress which was taken up as a cause by a relatively new political current - socialism - in 1848. The revolutions therefore thrust the 'social question' firmly and irrevocably into politics. Any subsequent regime, no matter how conservative or authoritarian, ignored it at its peril. In 1848, however, the question of what to do about poverty would prove to be one of the great nemeses of the liberal revolutionary regimes."

delanceyplace.com 2/21/11 - washington gets a letter

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:23:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in 1786, George Washington did not accept his invitation to the Constitutional Convention, which would desperately need his presence to have a chance of succeeding in its attempt to replace the Articles of Confederation which then governed the thirteen states:

"A few days before Christmas in 1786 George Washington received a gift he didn't want. It was a letter from Virginia's governor, Edmund Randolph, trying to pry him out of retirement.

"The envelope included a copy of an act passed on December 4 by the Virginia general assembly appointing delegates to a convention in Philadelphia 'for the purpose of revising the federal constitution' and the names of seven delegates the legislature had chosen. Washington's name stood at the top of the list. Randolph explained that the assembly was alarmed by the 'storms' that threatened to bring the American nation to a quick end, as its enemies had predicted. 'To you I need not press our present dangers,' Randolph said. As commander of the army Washington had witnessed the inefficiency of the Continental Congress and could see the steadily 'increasing langour of our associated republics.' Now only those 'who began, carried on & consummated the revolution' could 'rescue America from the impending ruin.' Randolph urged Washington to accept the legislature's unanimous choice of him as a Virginia delegate to the Philadelphia convention.'

"His appointment was not a complete surprise to Washington. He had tried to head it off in November, after James Madison, a leader of the assembly and former member of the Confederation Congress, warned him that the legislature was going to choose delegates to the convention and that Washington's name would probably be first on the list. It was 'out of his power' to accept such an appointment, Washington replied. A few weeks earlier - on October 31, 1786 - he had notified state chapters of the Society of the Cincinnati that he would not stand for reelection as the society's president and would not attend its second triennial meeting, which was scheduled to convene in Philadelphia on the first Monday in May - a week before the federal Convention would assemble in the same city. Washington gave the Cincinnati several compelling reasons for his decision: His private affairs had become seriously 'deranged' by his long absence during the war, and they now needed his 'entire & unremitting attention'; he was deeply and 'unavoidably engaged' in a project to open navigation of the great rivers flowing through Virginia, and, after so many years of arduous service, he yearned for 'retirement & relaxation from public cares.' Moreover, his health was not good: He had recently suffered a violent attack of 'fever & ague, succeeded by rheumatick pains' such as he had never before experienced. How then could he pick up and go to the federal Convention without offending 'a very respectable & deserving part of the Community - the late officers of the American Army,' who made up the Society of the Cincinnati?

"In fact, Washington had another, more pressing reason for backing away from his association with the Cincinnati, which he explained in confidence to Madison. When he had first agreed to head the new society In 1783, he
thought of it as a fraternal organization whose main purpose was to take care of officers' widows and other dependents. Then, to his surprise, a pamphlet by South Carolina's Aedanus Burke provoked an uproar against the Cincinnati and, above all, its plan to pass membership on to the eldest sons of Revolutionary War officers. Critics such as Burke said that practice would lead to the creation of an hereditary aristocracy, which was totally at odds
with the republican system established by the Revolution.

"Washington accepted reelection as president at the Society's first general meeting in 1784 after it proposed several changes in its rules, including the elimination of hereditary membership. But some state chapters refused to ratify the reforms, so by the fall of 1786, as the Society's second general meeting approached, Washington found himself, as he told Madison, in a 'delicate' position. He didn't want to seem disloyal to his fellow officers, who included some of his dearest friends and confidants, nor did he want to support an institution 'incompatible (some say) with republican principles.' Under the circumstances, he simply could not attend the federal Convention in Philadelphia while the Society of the Cincinnati was also meeting there. That was his excuse, deeply felt and, to Madison at least, clearly explained.

"Washington was more circumspect with Randolph. He was grateful for the honor conferred on him by the general assembly, he wrote the governor, and in general stood ready to obey the calls of his country. However, there were at the moment 'circumstances' that 'will render my acceptance of this fresh mark of confidence incompatible with other measures which I had previously adopted' and from which he had 'little prospect of disengaging myself.' The legislature should replace him with someone 'on whom greater reliance can be had,' since the likelihood of his nonattendance was too great."

delanceyplace.com 2/18/11 - sinatra

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:09:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Frank Sinatra carried the scars of his traumatic birth for the rest of his life:

"A raw December Sunday afternoon in 1915, a day more like the old century than the new among the wood-frame tenements and horse-shit-flecked cobblestones of Hoboken's Little Italy, a.k.a. Guinea Town. The air smells of coal smoke and imminent snow. The kitchen of the cold-water flat on Monroe Street is full of women, all gathered around a table, all shouting at once. On the table lies a copper-haired girl, just nineteen, hugely pregnant. She moans hoarsely: the labor has stalled. The midwife wipes the poor girl's brow and motions with her other hand. A doctor is sent for. Ten long minutes later he arrives, removes his overcoat, and with a stern look around the room - he is the lone male present - opens his black bag. From the shining metallic array inside he removes his dreaded obstetric forceps, a medieval-looking instrument, and grips the baby with it, pulling hard from the mother's womb, in the violent process fearfully tearing the left side of the child's face and neck, as well as its left ear.

"The doctor cuts the cord and lays the infant - a boy, huge and blue and bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead - by the kitchen sink, quickly shifting his efforts to saving the nearly unconscious mother's life. The women lean in, mopping the mother's pallid face, shouting advice in Italian. One at the back of the scrum - perhaps the mother's mother, perhaps someone else - looks at the inert baby and takes pity. She picks it up, runs some ice-cold water from the sink over it, and slaps its back. It starts, snuffles, and begins to howl.

"Mother and child both survived, but neither ever forgot the brutality of that December day. Frank Sinatra bore the scars of his birth, both physical and psychological, to the end of his years. A bear-rug-cherubic baby picture shot a few weeks after he was born was purposely taken from his right side, since the wounds on the left side of his face and neck were still angry-looking. Throughout Sinatra's vastly documented life, he would rarely - especially if he had anything to do with it - be photographed from his left. One scar, hard to disguise (though frequently airbrushed), ran diagonally from the lower-left corner of his mouth to his jawline. His ear on that side had a bifurcated lobe - the classic cauliflower - but that was the least of it: the delicate ridges and planes of his left outer ear were mashed, giving the appearance, in early pictures, of an apricot run over by a steamroller. The only connection between the sonic world and the external auditory meatus - the ear hole - was a vertical slit. Later plastic surgery would correct the problem to some extent.

"That wasn't all. In childhood, a mastoid operation would leave a thick ridge of scar tissue on his neck behind the ear's base. A severe case of cystic acne in adolescence compounded his sense of disfigurement: as an adult, he would apply Max Factor pancake makeup to his face and neck every morning and again after each of the several showers he took daily.

"Sinatra later told his daughter Nancy that when he was eleven, after some playmates began to call him 'Scarface,' he went to the house of the physician who had delivered him, determined to give the good doctor a good beating. Fortunately, the doctor wasn't home. Even when he was in his early forties, on top of the world and in the midst of an artistic outpouring unparalleled in the history of popular music, the birth trauma - and his mother - were very much on Sinatra's mind. Once, in a moment of extraordinary emotional nakedness, the singer opened up very briefly to a lover. 'They weren't thinking about me,' he said bitterly. 'They were just thinking about my mother. They just kind of ripped me out and tossed me aside.' "

delanceyplace.com 2/17/11 - crying

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - sad crying versus protest crying:

"Some researchers now say that the common psychological wisdom about crying - crying as a healthy catharsis - is incomplete and misleading. Having a 'good cry' can and usually does allow people to recover some mental balance after a loss. But not always and not for everyone argues a review article in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. ...

"In her book Seeing Through Tears: Crying and Attachment, Judith Kay Nelson, a therapist and teacher living in Berkeley, CA, argues that the experience of crying is rooted in early childhood and people's relationship with their primary caregiver, usually a parent. Those whose parents were attentive, soothing their cries when needed, tend to find that crying also provides them solace as adults. Those whose parents held back or became irritated or overly upset by the child's crying often have more difficulty soothing themselves as adults.

" 'Crying for a child is a way to beckon the caregiver to maintain proximity and use the caregiver to regulate mood or negative arousal,' Dr. Nelson said in a phone interview. Those who grow up unsure of when or whether that soothing is available can as adults get stuck in what she calls protest crying - the child's helpless squall for someone to fix the problem, undo the loss.

" 'You can't work through grief if you're stuck in protest crying, which is all about fixing it, fixing the loss,' Dr. Nelson said. 'And in therapy - as in close relationships - protest crying is very hard to soothe, because you can't do anything right, you can't undo the loss. On the other hand sad crying, that is, an appeal for comfort from a loved one, is a path to closeness and healing.'

"Tears can cleanse all right. But like a flash flood they may also leave a person feeling stranded and soaked."

delanceyplace.com 2/16/11 - ice

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in the early 1800s, before the invention of modern refrigeration, one of America's biggest and most envied businesses was making, selling, and exporting ice:

"What was desperately needed was a way of keeping foods safe and fresh for longer periods than nature allowed. ... So when in the early 1840s a miracle product came along that promised to transform matters, there was a great deal of excitement. The product was an unexpectedly familiar one: ice. ...

"Lake ice was a marvelous product. It created itself at no cost to the producer, was clean, renewable, and infinite in supply. The only drawbacks were that there was no infrastructure to produce and store it, and no market to sell it to. In order to make the ice industry exist, it was necessary to work out ways to cut and lift ice on a large scale, build storehouses, secure trading rights, and engage a reliable chain of shippers and agents. Above all, the producer had to create a demand for ice in places where ice had seldom or never been seen and was most assuredly not something anyone was predisposed to pay for. The man who did all this was a Bostonian of good birth and challenging disposition named Frederic Tudor. Making ice a commercial proposition became his overweening obsession.

"The notion of shipping ice from New England to distant ports was considered completely mad—'the vagary of a disordered brain,' in the words of one of his contemporaries. The first shipment of ice to Britain so puzzled customs officials as to how to classify it that all three hundred tons of it melted away before it could be moved off the docks. Shipowners were highly reluctant to accept it as cargo. They didn't relish the humiliation of arriving in a port with a holdful of useless water, but they were also wary of the very real danger of tons of shifting ice and sloshing meltwater making their ships unstable. These were men, after all, whose nautical instincts were based entirely on the idea of keeping water outside the ship, so they were loath to take on such an eccentric risk when there wasn't even a certain market at the end of it all. ...

"[But] gradually it caught on and eventually it made Tudor and many others rich. For several decades, ice was America's second biggest crop, measured by weight. If securely insulated, ice could last a surprisingly long while. It could even survive the 16,000-mile, 130-day trip from Boston to Bombay - or at least about two-thirds of it could, enough to make the long trip profitable. Ice went to the farthest corners of South America and from New England to California via Cape Horn. Sawdust, a product previously without any value at all, proved to be an excellent insulator, providing useful extra income for Maine lumber mills. ...

"[Though much ice was exported,] the real market, it turned out, was in America itself. As Gavin Weightman notes in his history of the business, The Frozen-Water Trade, Americans appreciated ice as no people had before. They used it to chill beer and wine, to make delectable icy cocktails, to soothe fevers, and to create a vast range of frozen treats. Ice cream became popular—and startlingly inventive, too. At Delmonico's, the celebrated New York restaurant, customers could order pumpernickel rye ice cream and asparagus ice cream, among many other unexpected flavors. Manhattan alone consumed nearly 1 million tons of ice a year, while Brooklyn sucked down 334,000 tons, Boston 380,000, and Philadelphia 377,000. Americans grew immensely proud of the civilizing conveniences of ice. 'Whenever you hear America abused,' one American told Sarah Maury, a visiting Briton, 'remember the ice.'

"Where ice really came into its own was in the refrigeration of railway cars, which allowed the transport of meat and other perishables from coast to coast. Chicago became the epicenter of the railway industry in part because it could generate and keep huge quantities of ice. Individual ice houses in Chicago held up to 250,000 tons of ice. Before ice, in hot weather milk (which came out of the cow warm, of course) could be kept for only an hour or two before it began to spoil. Chicken had to be eaten on the day of plucking. Fresh meat was seldom safe for more than a day. Now food could be kept longer locally, but it could also be sold in distant markets. Chicago got its first lobster in 1842, brought in from the East Coast in a refrigerated railway car. Chicagoans came to stare at it as if it had arrived from a distant planet. For the first time in history food didn't have to be consumed close to where it was produced. Farmers on the boundless plains of the American Midwest could not only produce food more cheaply and abundantly than anywhere else but also sell it almost anywhere."

delanceyplace.com 2/15/11 - the uss cole

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in October of 2000, members of al-Qaeda blew up the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden. Al-Qaeda's members came from the displaced and alienated, and its operations were equal parts brilliance and bungling. Like al-Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center towers a year later, its purpose was to raise the profile of the group, to boost its perennially flagging membership recruiting, and to provoke a disproportionate response by the U.S. But the U.S. did not respond, leaving Bin Laden angry and disappointed. And yet there were benefits - the cash that poured in because of the success of the mission left the Taliban less uneasy about tolerating al-Qaeda's presence in their country:

"What the recruits [of al-Qaeda] tended to have in common - besides their
urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills - was displacement. Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared. They were Algerians living in expatriate enclaves in France, Moroccans in Spain, or Yemenis in Saudi Arabia. Despite their accomplishments, they had little standing in the host societies where they lived. Like Sayyid Qutb [a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood], they defined themselves as radical Muslims while living in the West. The Pakistani in London found that he was neither authentically British nor authentically Pakistani; and this feeling of marginality was just as true for Lebanese in Kuwait as it was for Egyptians in Brooklyn. Alone, alienated, and often far from his family, the exile turned to the mosque, where he found companionship and the consolation of religion. Islam provided the element of commonality It was more than a faith - it was an identity. ...

"Al-Qaeda's ... approach had worked well in the embassy bombings, but the operations scheduled for the millennium had gone awry. One had been a comical fiasco: the attempted bombing of USS The Sullivans at the end of Ramadan, when the fiberglass skiff that was supposed to attack the destroyer had foundered so ignominiously in Aden's harbor. Bin Laden ... wanted them to sink an American warship. When [the first attempt at] that failed, bin Laden demanded that the two suicide bombers be replaced.

"Aden perches on the slope of a former volcano, the collapsed cone of which forms one of the finest deepwater ports in the world. The name derives from the belief that this is the site of the Garden of Eden. ... Docked at a fueling buoy was the USS Cole, a billion-dollar guided-missile destroyer. Using advanced stealth technology, the sleek warship was designed to be less visible to radar, but it was starkly evident in the Aden harbor: more than five hundred feet long, displacing 8,300 tons, with its swirling antenna scanning the skies for any foreseeable threat. ...

On October 12, 2000, at 11:15 a.m., as the Cole was preparing to get under way, a fiberglass fishing boat approached its massive prey. Some of the sailors were standing watch, but many were belowdecks or waiting in the chow line. Two men brought the tiny skiff to a halt amidships, smiled and waved, then stood at attention. The symbolism and the asymmetry of this moment were exactly what bin Laden had dreamed of. 'The destroyer represented the capital of the West,' he said, 'and the small boat represented Mohammed.' The shock wave of the enormous explosion in the harbor knocked over cars onshore. Two miles away, people thought there was an earthquake. In a taxi in the city, the concussion shook Fahd al-Quso, a member of the al-Qaeda support team who was running late; he was supposed to have videotaped the attack, but he slept through the page on his phone that would have notified him to set up the camera. The blast opened a hole forty feet by forty feet in the port side of the ship, tearing apart sailors who were waiting for lunch. Seventeen of them perished, and thirty-nine were wounded. ...

"The strike on the Cole had been a great victory for bin Laden. Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan filled with new recruits, and contributors from the Gulf states arrived carrying Samsonite suitcases filled with petrodollars, as in the glory days of the Afghan jihad. At last there was money to spread around. The Taliban leadership, which was still divided about bin Laden's presence in the country, became more compliant when cash appeared, despite the threat of sanctions and reprisals. Bin Laden separated his senior leaders - Abu Hafs to another location in Kandahar, and Zawahiri to Kabul - so that the anticipated American response would not kill the al-Qaeda leadership all at once.

"But there was no American response. The country was in the middle of a presidential election, and Clinton was trying to burnish his legacy by securing a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. The Cole bombing had occurred just as the talks were falling apart. Clinton maintains that, despite the awkward political timing, his administration came close to launching another missile attack against bin Laden that October, but at the last minute the CIA recommended calling it off because his presence at the site was not completely certain. Bin Laden was angry and disappointed. He hoped to lure America into the same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan. His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds."

delanceyplace.com 2/14/11 - testosterone and oxytocin

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:33:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Valentine's Day tidbits. Where to we find enduring love? Answer: Oxytocin. Infidelity? Testosterone. Heartbreak? Low serotonin and endorphins. In fact, our loved ones are actually present in our brains - neurochemically - and when lost it results in chemical trauma for the brain:

"The desire to commit to someone is strongly linked to ... oxytocin. ... Oxytocin is released by the pituitary gland and acts on the ovaries and testes to regulate reproduction. Researchers suspect that this hormone is important for forming close social bonds. The levels of this chemical rise when couples watch romantic movies, hug, or hold hands. Prairie voles, when injected with oxytocin, pair much faster than normally. Blocking oxytocin prevents them from bonding in a normal way. This is similar in humans, because couples bond to certain characteristics in each other. This is why you are attracted to the same type of man or woman repeatedly. In general, levels of oxytocin are lower in men, except after an orgasm, where they are raised more than 500 percent. This may explain why men feel very sleepy after an orgasm. This is the same hormone released in babies during breast-feeding, which makes them sleepy as well.

delanceyplace.com 2/11/11 - excuses

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:27:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - a college professor and author wonders at the human tendency to make excuses:

"I have never understood why students feel obligated to concoct fantastic stories regarding absences, missed tests and assignments, and the inability to meet deadlines. Do they fear my reaction if they were simply to say, 'I'm sorry I was absent. Can I give you the assignment today?'

"The compulsion to explain one's circumstances is not limited to the classroom. I was in the bank the other day and stood behind a woman speaking to a teller. She asked to withdraw five hundred dollars. That's where I would have stopped; but for some reason she seemed chagrined about this request, lowered her voice, and confided to the teller, 'I don't usually take out this much money, but my son is short this month. He has a good job, though, and when be repays me I'll deposit it again.'

"The teller nodded passively as he counted out the bills, but the customer looked uncomfortable, as if she were doing something unorthodox, like facing the back of a crowded elevator. She conveyed the distinct impression that it was the bank's money she was requesting and that they might be judging her for her lack of self-control.

"Likewise, I was once riding the city bus when it stopped to allow an elderly man to get on. He deposited his fare and then sheepishly explained to the driver that he realized this wasn't the bus he usually took and that he would get back on track with his usual bus in the morning.

"I think college students are similarly afflicted. What is it about college that brings out the apologist in them? Where do they get their ability to craft such glib narratives? Let me give an example. ...

"A young woman missed a laboratory exercise she needed to keep her grade in the passing range. She eventually showed up a few days later. 'You'll never believe what happened:' she said.

" 'You had to withdraw five hundred dollars from the bank because your son can't manage his money?'

"She looked at me. 'My son is three,' she said.

" 'Go on, then.'

" 'Well, I was rushing to class, driving up the hill in Charleston. You know the hill?'

" 'Of course.'

" 'Well, at the top of the hill I ran out of gas. I got confused and the car rolled back down. But there was a cop at the bottom of the hill. He gave me a ticket for speeding backwards. I was so upset that I had to go home and lie down.'

"It had to be true. How could anyone make up such a thing? ... When I try to write fiction, I find myself thinking, 'Well, a story about a priest who goes swimming at the Y to observe women's bodies is interesting, but how can it compare with Dan's story about his Saint Bernard falling through the river ice with his biology assignment in its jaws, or Lauren's about rushing home to retrieve her laboratory worksheet only to find her boyfriend in bed with another guy and having to drive three hundred miles to her mother's home in Madawaska for consolation?' All of this leads me to agree with those who have observed that there is no longer a need for fiction. Not in this world."

delanceyplace.com 2/10/11 - cigarette smoking

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:09:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the Roaring 1920s brought a boom - in business activity, in consumer spending, and in cigarette smoking. U.S. cigarette production doubled during the decade as people hungered for sophistication and as Prohibition, which had unintentionally increased alcohol consumption, increased cigarette smoking along with it:

"New issues of securities of industrial companies would increase from 690 [in 1924] to nearly 2000 in 1929. Brokers' loans to investors and share ownership would quadruple by 1929. The number of Americans who paid tax on income of a million dollars a year also would quadruple.

"The new optimism about the future led to a boom in consumer spending. Radio sales doubled in 1923, then tripled in 1924. On average nearly every family had a car and drivers were branching out from black Model Ts to an assortment of new makes in colors ranging from 'Florentine cream' to 'Versailles violet.' Average people bought items they hadn't imagined spending money on just a few years earlier: from Listerine mouthwash and crossword puzzle books, to vacuum cleaners and meat slicers, to new golf clubs and even property in Florida.

"Prosperity changed the culture. Suddenly there were traffic lights, filling stations, and new concrete highways with chicken dinner restaurants and tourist rest stops. Giant broadcast radio stations with nationwide hookups brought Graham McNamee's play-by-play or the Happiness Boys or reports on the Scopes Monkey Trial into more than one out of three homes. More Americans followed politics now, including the presidential nominating convention which was covered live from Madison Square Garden. ...

"Along with America's new wealth came a hunger for sophistication. College applications spiked as did international travel. The most popular nonfiction books included Outline of Science, The Story of Philosophy, Why We Behave Like Human Beings and Emily Post's Book of Etiquette (the top seller). The now-literary-minded masses read an astonishing rush of new novels during this period: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, Franz Kafka's The Trial and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Newly minted intellectuals tried to parse James Joyce's Ulysses or T S. Eliot's The Waste Land. New fans of the arts listened to George Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue' and saw plays by Eugene O'Neill, who won three Pulitzer Prizes during the 1920s.

"One sure way for both men and women to appear sophisticated was to smoke cigarettes. Advertisers depicted pretty girls, cigarettes in hand, imploring men to blow smoke their way. Tobacco manufacturers announced that 'now women may enjoy a companionable smoke with their husbands and brothers.' Women had earned the vote and entered the work force, now millions of women of all ages exercised their right to take up smoking. Blue tobacco smoke wafted through theater lobbies where Greta Garbo's most important silent movies - Flesh and the Devil, The Temptress, The Torrent, and Love - appeared in 1926 and 1927 just as talking movies debuted. Sports fans smoked as they watched Babe Ruth, also a smoker, hit sixty home runs in 1927 for the New York Yankees; his teammates, known as 'Murderers' Row,' easily smoked their way through the World Series that year. Prohibition also fueled smoking just as it increased illegal alcohol consumption. The more people drank the more they craved a smoke. ...

"During the decade prior to 1929, U.S. cigarette production doubled."

delanceyplace.com 2/9/11 - deporting germans

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - at the end of World War II, millions of people of German heritage were forcibly deported to Germany from other European countries where they and their forbearers had long lived. This was part of an even larger series of heartbreaking, forced migrations of Europeans of many different heritages which left European nations ethnically homogeneous to an unprecedented degree:

"What was taking place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer. ... The largest affected group was the Germans.

"The upshot was de jure recognition of a new reality. Eastern Europe had been forcibly cleared of its German populations: as Stalin had promised in September 1941, he had returned 'East Prussia back to Slavdom, where it belongs.' In the Potsdam Declaration it was agreed 'that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner', but under the circumstances this was hardly likely. Some Western observers were shocked at the treatment of the German communities. Anne O'Hare McCormick, a New York Times correspondent, recorded her impressions on October 23rd 1946: 'The scale of this resettlement, and the conditions in which it takes place, are without precedent in history."

delanceyplace.com 2/8/11 - the only colony with no militia

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - William Penn's colony of Pennsylvania was the only colony in the New World which did not have a militia. Penn felt no need for a militia, since he alone among the colonizers put in place a system to provide justice to Indians at parity with the justice provided to colonists. In fact, it was by his design that the Indians were better-armed and militarily more competent than the colonists. The result was that "of all the places one could live in the Atlantic world, Pennsylvania was the one least likely to suffer the horrors of war." In no small part because of this peace, Europeans flocked to Philadelphia causing it to quickly surpass Boston as the largest colonial city, and the population of Pennsylvania grew from 18,000 in 1700 to 120,000 by the end of 1750:

"Penn's extraordinary intention to deal with Indians fairly, generously, and—uniquely—to refrain from coercion by arms or the threat of violence reflected his distinctive combination of idealism and pragmatism. Without Indian cooperation, he had no hope of acquiring enough territory to produce the capital he needed to support his 'holy experiment.' Since he had begun selling lots to the First Purchasers in July 1681, before a formal treaty had been made with the Indians, it was imperative that he put Indian relations on a stable footing as soon as possible. Above all, he knew that he had to keep the natives from misconstruing the intentions of the colonists who would soon begin flooding into southeastern Pennsylvania. ...

"He assured them, he was 'not such a Man' as those who had [Indians] done harm; rather, 'I desire to Winn and gain your Love & freindship by a kind, just and peaceable life; and the People I send are of the same mind, & shall in all things behave themselv[e]s accordingly; and if in any thing any shall offend you or your People, you shall have full and Speedy Satisfaction for the same by an equall number of honest men on both sides that by no means you may have just Occasion of being offended against them.' ...

"As a kind of first installment on his promises, Penn had already set out twenty conditions, or 'Concessions,' by which those who purchased property from him were expected to abide. Five of these pertained to colonists' conduct toward Indians, stressing equality of treatment and the protection of native interests. All commercial transactions, including those between Indians and planters, were to take place in the public market, where inspectors could certify weights and measures to prevent fraud, so 'that the natives may not be abused or provoked.' If any colonist should 'affront or wrong' an Indian, the same penalties and laws would apply as if the affronted or wronged party had been a planter. If on the other hand an Indian wronged a colonist, the injured party had no right to take the law into his own hands; he could only make a complaint to the governor or his deputy. The governor in turn would negotiate a settlement 'With the king of the said Indian, that all reasonable satisfaction be made to the said injured planter.' Indians were to have the same rights 'to the improvement of their ground and providing sustenance for their families' as the planters. Most unusual of all was the provision Penn mentioned in his letter to the Indians: disputes between natives and colonists were to be settled by arbitration—'ended,' as he put it, 'by twelve men, that is, by six planters and six natives; that so we may live friendly together and, as much as in us lies, prevent all occasions of heart burnings and mischiefs.'

"No other colonial proprietor in America took so much care to establish standards for the fair treatment of natives, but of course no other proprietor had tried to create a colony without a militia, either. Penn's province, by design, would be a place in which the Indians were better-armed and militarily more competent than the colonists. In such a circumstance, equality, equity, and justice formed the only reasonable, prudent basis for Anglo-Indian relations."

delanceyplace.com 2/7/11 - private rooms

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in the middle ages, English houses owned by the wealthy consisted primarily of a single great room called the "hall." The fourteenth century brought improvements to fireplace construction which allowed for second floors, which in turn brought an explosion in the construction of private, separate rooms—including the boudoir, literally "a room to sulk in." Even with this new privacy, residents still often copulated and defecated in full view of children, servants and friends:

"Practically all living, awake or asleep, was done in this single large, mostly bare, always smoky chamber. Servants and family ate, dressed, and slept together—'a custom which conduced neither to comfort nor the observance of the proprieties,' as J. Alfred Gotch noted with a certain clear absence of comfort himself in his classic book The Growth of the English House (1909). Through the whole of the medieval period, till well into the fifteenth century, the hall effectively was the house, so much so that it became the convention to give its name to the entire dwelling, as in Hardwick Hall or Toad Hall.

"Every member of the household, including servants, retainers, dowager widows, and anyone else with a continuing attachment, was considered family—they were literally familiar, to use the word in its original sense. In the most commanding (and usually least drafty) position in the hall was a raised platform called a dais, where the owner and his family ate—a practice recalled by the high tables still found in colleges and boarding schools that have (or sometimes simply wish to project) a sense of long tradition. The head of the household was the husband—a compound term meaning literally 'householder' or 'house owner.' His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management became known as husbandry. Only much later did husband come to signify a marriage partner. ...

"As houses sprouted wings and spread, and domestic arrangements grew more complex, words were created or adapted to describe all the new room types: study, bedchamber, privy chamber, closet, oratory (for a place of prayer), parlor, withdrawing chamber, and library (in a domestic as opposed to institutional sense) all date from the fourteenth century or a little earlier. Others soon followed: gallery, long gallery, presence chamber, tiring (for attiring) chamber, salon or saloon, apartment, lodgings, suite, and estude. 'How widely different is all this from the ancient custom of the whole household living by day and night in the great hall!' wrote J. Alfred Gotch in a moment of rare exuberance. One new type not mentioned by Gotch was boudoir, literally 'a room to sulk in,' which from its earliest days was associated with sexual intrigue.

delanceyplace.com 2/4/11 - managing slaves

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - as part of his education, Julius Caesar (100 BCE - 44 BCE) would have been able to read instructions on how to manage slaves written by the legendary statesman Marcus Porcius Cato (234 BCE - 149 BCE):

"[For an aristocrat in Rome at the time of Julius Caesar], farm management meant, primarily, slave management. Fortunately, Cato had left detailed instructions on the subject. He distinguished, of course, between domestic and farm slaves although, in general, he treated all 'like beasts of burden, using them to the uttermost, then, when they were old, driving them off and selling them ... like shoes or pots and pans, casting them aside when they are bruised and worn out with service.' With domestic slaves Cato had advice on how and when to praise, threaten, reprimand or reward. To prevent conspiracies he promoted dissension and rivalry among them. He entrusted the chief steward with major responsibilities and permitted him to be shaved by the local barber, to gossip with other stewards in taverns and brothels, to participate in neighborhood clubs, to play ball and to attend the theater. The more willing and cunning slaves he encouraged to buy slaves of their own to train and to sell at a profit. The slovenly and the lazy he flogged.

"Farm slaves, distinguished as 'speaking tools' from 'mute' tools (animals) and 'lifeless' tools (equipment), were to be worked to the limits of their endurance and to be sold when they were no longer productive. The bailiff and perhaps a few specialists in viniculture and orchardry were permitted to marry. Most of the others were manacled and locked up at night. If caught stealing or stepping beyond the boundary stones or listening to itinerant astrologers (troublemakers who preached dangerous thoughts), they were to be beaten and assigned to hard labor. Habitual recalcitrants were hung overnight on a cross; captured runaways were branded on the forehead and locked in an iron collar inscribed with instructions for their return and an offer of reward. Incorrigible slaves were to be prodded to a place of execution, flogged and hoisted and nailed to a beam and left to strangle.

"In general, the employment and treatment of slaves was a pragmatic question, and many slaveholders accepted Aristotle's judgment: 'Every assistant is as it were a tool that serves for several tools; for if every tool could perform its own work when ordered or by seeing what to do in advance - thus shuttles wove and quills played harps by themselves - master craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.' On the other hand, slave rebellion was the greatest peril confronting [Roman] society. A good citizen exhibited no sentimentality in face of such a threat."

delanceyplace.com 2/3/11 - newspapers and textbooks

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese by Winston Moseley:

"The Kitty Genovese murder became infamous because of an article published on the front page of The New York Times. It began like this:

"'For more than half an hour, 38 respectable law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. ... Not one person telephoned the police during the assault one witness called after the woman was dead.' ...

"The incident so deeply shook the nation that over the next twenty years it inspired more academic research on bystander apathy than the Holocaust. To mark the thirtieth anniversary, President Bill Clinton visited New York City and spoke about the crime: 'It sent a chilling message about what had happened at that time in a society, suggesting that we were each of us not simply in danger but fundamentally alone.'

"More than thirty-five years later, the horror lived on in The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's groundbreaking book about social behavior as an example of the 'bystander effect' whereby the presence of multiple witnesses at a tragedy can actually inhibit intervention.

"Today more than forty years later the Kitty Genovese saga appears in all ten of the top-selling undergraduate textbooks for social psychology. One text describes the witnesses remaining 'at their windows in fascination for the 30 minutes it took her assailant to complete his grisly deed during which he returned for three separate attacks.' ...

"But was it true? ... Who then were 'the thirty-eight witnesses'? That number also supplied by the police was apparently a whopping overstatement. 'We only found half a dozen that saw what was going on that we could use' one of the prosecutors later recalled. This included one neighbor who, according to Joseph De May, may have witnessed part of the second attack but was apparently so drunk that he was reluctant to phone the police.

"But still: even if the murder was not a bloody and prolonged spectacle that took place in full view of dozens of neighbors, why didn't anyone call the police for help? Even that part of the legend may be false. ... [Winston Moseley was captured a few days later while robbing the home of a family named Bannister.] A neighbor approached and asked what he was doing. Moseley said he was helping the Bannisters move. The neighbor went back in his house and phoned another neighbor to ask if the Bannisters were really moving.

" 'Absolutely not' said the second neighbor. He called the police while the first neighbor went back outside and loosened the distributor cap on Moseley's car. When Moseley returned to his car and found it wouldn't start, he fled on foot but was soon chased down by a policeman. Under interrogation he freely admitted to killing Kitty Genovese a few nights earlier.

"Which means that a man who became infamous because he murdered a woman whose neighbors failed to intervene was ultimately captured because of ... a neighbor's intervention."

delanceyplace.com 2/2/11 - the great circle of life

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:23:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the great circle of life:

"Deep in the Cameroonian rain forests of west-central Africa there lives a floor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant - indeed, one of the very few capable of emitting a cry audible to the human ear - survives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain-forest floor.

"On occasion, while thus foraging, one of these ants will become infected by inhaling the microscopic spore of a fungus from the genus Tomentella, millions of which rain down upon the forest floor from somewhere in the canopy above. Upon being inhaled, the spore lodges itself inside the ant's tiny brain and immediately begins to grow, quickly fomenting bizarre behavioral changes in its ant host. The creature appears troubled and confused, and presently, for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins an arduous climb up the stalks of vines and ferns.

"Driven on and on by the still-growing fungus, the ant finally achieves a seemingly prescribed height whereupon, utterly spent, it impales the plant with its mandibles and, thus affixed, waits to die. Ants that have met their doom in this fashion are quite a common sight in certain sections of the rain forest.

"The fungus, for its part, lives on: it continues to consume the brain, moving on through the rest of the nervous system and, eventually, through all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spikelike protrusion erupts from out of what had once been the ant's head. Growing to a length of about an inch and a half, the spike features a bright orange tip, heavy-laden with spores, which now begin to rain down onto the forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale."

delanceyplace.com 2/1/11 - the aztecs

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - at their zenith, the short-lived Aztec empire sacrificed 50,000 prisoners a year to their gods. They were overturned when Hernan Cortes, a minor Spanish functionary who invaded Mexico in defiance of his superior, succeeded in enlisting the tribes that were being subjugated by the Aztecs - and unknowingly released the devastating effects of smallpox:

"From a modest start in the Valley of Mexico during the fourteenth century, the Aztecs had built an imperial state and a large standing army on the foundation of a religious system that required human sacrifice and a political system geared to war and the exaction of tribute. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Aztecs, governing from the great metropolis Tenochtitlan, exercised hegemony over perhaps 12 million people across central Mexico, sustaining their power by extorting food, precious metals, textiles, and labor from subject peoples. Perpetual warfare set the bounds of this empire, for two reasons. The Aztec economy (even to the extent of provisioning Tenochtitlan's population of 200,000) depended on a steady supply of tribute, which could only be maintained by fear of military retribution; and the Aztec religious system demanded the blood of human beings to maintain the balance of the cosmos and insure that the sun would rise each day. By 1500 approximately 50,000 prisoners of war had to be taken annually to serve as sacrificial victims.

"Cortes was a thirty-four-year-old lawyer discontented with the slow pace of his advancement in Cuba when he landed on the coast of Mexico, essentially as a freebooter, in 1519. Operating in defiance of his superior, Cuba's governor, he brought with him about five hundred soldiers, fourteen small cannon, a handful of horses, and little real idea of what he might encounter. Once this tiny force of would-be conquistadors demonstrated the military advantages of crossbows, gunpowder weapons, horses, and steel to the peoples they encountered near the coast, it was not particularly difficult for the Indians to see them as potentially useful allies against their Aztec enemy. Cortes, a brilliant practitioner of realpolitik, understood this well enough to ally himself with, first, the Cempoalans, and later (after initial clashes in which he and his armored men held their ground against massed formations of archers and slingsmen hurling stones) with the warlike Tlaxcalans.

"It was thus not merely a few hundred intrepid Castilians who conquered Tenochtitlan in 1521 but a few hundred Castilians in the company of perhaps 200,000 Indian allies. The conquest, as we now know, was effected less by technological and tactical superiority than by the support of these native warriors; it was ultimately secured by the devastating effects of the smallpox that the Spanish inadvertently introduced in the course of their invasion. Cortes and his men, however, concluded that the collapse of the Aztecs represented God's will and lost no time in inserting themselves in the place of the empire's previous rulers. Thus they were able to compensate themselves for the trouble of conquering Mexico by continuing to collect tribute through the existing system and to repay God for his help by instituting Christianity as the state religion."

delanceyplace.com 1/31/11 - the cost of civilization

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the move of the earliest societies from hunting and gathering to cities and farming brought stunted growth and disease:

"So sedentism meant poorer diets, more illness, lots of toothache and gum disease, and earlier deaths. What is truly extraordinary is that these are all still factors in our lives today. Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats---account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. Exactly the same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.

delanceyplace.com 1/28/11 - baseball umpires

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - major league umpires are the very integrity of the game and have served baseball well. The surest sign of their good work is in those games when they are largely unnoticed. However, there have been a few that were noticed - and even some that were notorious:

"In 1882, Richard Higham became the only umpire ever accused of dishonesty on the field. He was allegedly in league with gamblers, and on flimsy and dubious evidence (his accuser was a team owner angry about a call) he was thrown out of the sport.

"This isn't to say that umpires are morally or ethically pure. Most of them would admit they aren't, and even if they wouldn't, their history is dotted with brutish, scheming, or narrow-minded behavior. George Magerkurth, a habitual barroom brawler who worked in the National League from 1929 to 1947, was suspended for ten days in 1939 when he got in a fistfight during a game at the Polo Grounds in New York with the Giants shortstop Billy jurges.

"Bruce Froemming, who retired after the 2007 season, his thirty-seventh, as the longest-serving umpire in major league history, was suspended for ten days in 2003 when a religious slur directed at an umpiring administrator, Cathy Davis - he referred to her as 'a stupid Jew bitch' after an argument over travel arrangements - was caught on her answering machine. And in 2001, Al Clark lost his major league umpiring job after twenty-five years when he was fired for habitually cashing in the first-class airline tickets baseball provides the umpires for coach seats and pocketing the difference. Subsequently, he went to jail for fraud as part of a scheme to profit on phony memorabilia. Clark, who umpired in the 1978 American League playoff game between the Yankees and Red Sox (the game won by Bucky Dent's home run), Nolan Ryan's three hundredth career victory, and Dwight Gooden's no-hitter at Yankee Stadium in 1996, would sign baseballs and authentication documents certifying that the balls were used in those and other games, even though they weren't, then share in the profits of their sales.

"Even so, rarely if ever have the acts of malor league umpires threatened the honor of the game, though a couple of incidents have come to light showing them tiptoeing up to the line. In 1989, two umpires, Rich Garcia and Frank Pulli, were put on probation after the commissioner, Fay Vincent, learned through baseball's security office that they (along with Don Zimmer, then the manager of the Chicago Cubs) had placed bets with an illegal bookmaker (who was also a drug dealer) on sporting events other than baseball games.

"Froemming was among a handful of umpires who were chastised in the 1990s for asking ballplayers to sign baseballs they could then turn around and sell; baseball prohibits this as a conflict of interest, especially since the practice generally includes an implied threat.

" 'I'm getting ready to pitch - I was about to go out and warm up - and my catcher is trying to prepare for the game,' the former knuckleballer Tom Candiotti recalled in 2003 about a game in 1996 when he was with the Dodgers, whose catcher was Mike Piazza. 'And Froemming is telling Piazza this story about how one time Johnny Bench wouldn't sign baseballs for him, and Bench went oh for four that day with three called strikeouts, or something like that. So Piazza stopped stretching and signed the baseballs.'

"Anyway, the point is not that umpires are well - or badly - behaved. It's that even egregious behavior doesn't do much to raise their profiles. Even sex and death don't seem to put umpires in the public eye. Everyone knows that Joe DiMaggio was married to Marilyn Monroe, ... but it's mostly a secret that the onetime National League umpire Dick Stello was married to the 1970s porn star Chesty Morgan, a woman often referred to as having 'the world's largest naturally occurring bosom,' whose measurements were said to be 73-32-36.

"Finally, who is John McSherry? Except among umpires, who revered him, he's forgotten, unless it is as the spur that moved baseball to insist that umpires improve their physical condition. On April 1, 1996, opening day in Cincinnati, McSherry, who weighed well over three hundred pounds, was behind the plate when his heart failed. With the count 1-1 on the third batter of the game, Rondell White, McSherry called time and moved toward the home dugout. He signaled to someone, perhaps the team doctor, then collapsed and died, the only umpire ever to perish on the field."

delanceyplace.com 1/27/11 - beef

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:33:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - beef. In nature, cows graze and eat prairie grass. In the beef industry, cows are taken to CAFOs - Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations - where they live in small lots and are fed corn. It is this beef that ends up on our dinner tables:

"So then why [aren't steers fed grass]? Speed, in a word, or in the industry's preferred term, 'efficiency.' Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and for half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal's allotted span on earth. 'In my grandfather's time, cows were four or five years old at slaughter' [a CAFO operator] explained. 'In the fifties when my father was ranching, it was two or three years old. Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months.' Fast food indeed. What gets a steer from 80 to 1,100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs. ...

"[At the CAFO's] thundering hub, three meals a day for thirty-seven thousand animals are designed and mixed by computer. A million pounds of feed pass through the mill each day. Every hour of every day, a tractor trailer pulls up to the loading dock to deliver another fifty tons of corn. ... [to which are added] thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and protein supplements, vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen and ... fifty-pound sacks of antibiotics - Rumensin and Tylosin. Along with alfalfa, hay and silage (for roughage), all these ingredients will be automatically blended and then piped into the parade of dump trucks that three times a day fan out from here to keep the [CAFO's] eight and a half miles of trough filled. ...

"We've come to think of 'corn-fed' as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you're referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old nor virtuous. ...

"Cattle rarely live on feedlot diets for more than 150 days, which might be about as much as their systems can tolerate. 'I don't know how long you could feed them this ration before you'd see problems,' [Veterinarian] Dr. Mel Metzin said; another vet told me the diet would eventually 'blow out their livers' and kill them. Over time, the acids eat away at the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to enter the animal's bloodstream. These microbes wind up in the liver where they form abscesses and impair the liver's function. Between 15 percent and 30 percent of feedlot cows are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers. ... What keeps a feedlot animal healthy - or healthy enough - are antibiotics."

delanceyplace.com 1/26/11 - pinning mistletoe to her backside

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:29:00 -0500

In today's excerpt -Zelda (Sayre) Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald and daughter of a conservative, moralizing associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was widely known as a wild child in the 1910s in Montgomery, Alabama. Part of the great moral rebellion that accompanied World War I and carried through the Roaring 20s, Zelda is assumed to have been one of her husband Scott's models for characters in This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby:

"Given her family's standing in the community, Zelda's frequent exploits were sure fodder for gossip. There was the day she climbed to the roof of her house, kicked away the ladder, and compelled the fire company to rescue her from certain injury and disgrace. Or the time she borrowed her friend's snappy little Stutz Bearcat to drive down to Boodler's Bend, a local lover's lane concealed by a thick orchard of pecan trees, and shone a spotlight on those of her schoolmates who were necking in the backseats of parked cars. Or those other occasions when she repeated the same trick, but at the front entrance to Madam Helen St. Clair's notorious city brothel.

"Most disturbing to Judge Sayre was Zelda's well-earned reputation for violating the time-honored codes of sexual propriety that seemed everywhere under attack by the time the opening shots were fired in World War I. Already a veritable legend among hundreds of well-heeled fraternity brothers as far and wide as the University of Alabama, Auburn University, and Georgia Tech, Zelda was 'the most popular girl at every dance,' as a would-be suitor remembered years later.

"Part of Zelda's renown surely was owed to her habit of sneaking out of country club dances—and sometimes her bedroom window—to join Montgomery's most eligible bachelors for a few hours of necking, petting, and drinking in secluded backseat venues. On more than a few occasions, the inviting aroma of pear trees, the dim glow of a half-moon, and the tentative sound of a boyfriend's car horn were all the inspiration Zelda needed to walk quietly across her plain whitewashed room, draw open the curtains, and creep down to the tin roof that protected the Sayre family's front porch. "After that, she was gone into the night. ...

"When the entire senior class cut school on April 1, it was Zelda who pooled everyone's money and flirted with the nice agent at the Empire Theatre, who happily granted the students admission at a cut rate. And it was Zelda who triumphantly organized a group photo in front of the ticket box. ...

" 'Zelda would have been the last to deny that she danced cheek to cheek and did the Shimmy, the Charleston, and the Black Bottom,' [Sara Mayfield, her loyal childhood friend, admitted]. But 'if she gave a demonstration of the Hula at a midterm dance at the University of Alabama, had not Alice Roosevelt, the President's daughter, been similarly criticized for doing the same thing . . . ?"

"To be sure, Zelda 'rode behind her admirers ... on their motorcycles with her arms around them, raised her hemlines to the knee, bobbed her hair, smoked, tippled, and kissed the boys goodbye.' But this sort of 'flirtation was an old Southern custom; "going the limit" was not. Zelda was a reigning beauty and 'a knockout' in the paleolithic slang of the day, far too popular to have 'put out' for her beaux, far too shrewd in the tactics and strategy of popularity to grant her favors to one suitor and thereby alienate a regiment of them.

"Maybe so, maybe not. But Zelda did her best to cultivate a scandalous reputation. She encouraged reports of skinny-dipping excursions and multiple romantic entanglements. During the summer, when it got too hot, she slipped out of her underwear and asked her date to hold it for the evening in his coat pocket. And at a legendary Christmas bop, when a chaperone reproached her for dancing too closely and too wantonly with her date, Zelda retaliated by swiping a band of mistletoe and pinning it to her backside.

delanceyplace.com 1/25/11 - "making men happy"

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:12:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - euphemisms for the word "prostitute":

"If prostitutes are members of the world's oldest profession, then devising alternative names for them is one of the oldest forms of euphemizing. Streetwalker - in use for more than four centuries - is among the most euphemistic. Christian essayist G. K. Chesterton once fretted that referring to women who sold their bodies as simply 'ones who walked the streets' condoned this contemptible occupation. Other euphemistic terms that might have concerned Chesterton include sporting lady, fancy lady, lady of the night, working girl, call girl, and party girl. Perhaps alluding to their status as members of the oldest profession, some prostitutes in his time called themselves professionals. When academy was a euphemism for 'brothel,' those who worked there were called academicians.

"Prostitute first appeared in the early seventeenth century as a euphemism for 'whore,' one that drew on the Latin verb prostituere, or "offer for sale." (A female character in Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, says 'prostitute me to the basest groom / That doth frequent your house.') Whore evolved from the Anglo-Saxon 'hore,' which some etymologists think may be a euphemism for a word never recorded.After 'whore' took on connotations, sixteenth-century translations of the Bible replaced that word with harlot. This term originally referred to a disreputable young man, then was applied time, "harlot" itself became so contaminated that it could no longer appear in respectable publications.

"Another synonym for 'prostitute,' tart, has an interesting etymology. Originally that noun referred to a small pastry, as it still does today. Over time, 'tart' was used affectionately for a sweet young woman, then for women considered sexually alluring, After that, 'tart' became synonymous with a promiscuous woman. Finally, it referred to women who charged for sexual services, at best 'a tart with a heart,"

"During the American Civil War, camp followers, whose ranks included 'canteen girls,' and 'drink sellers,' offered soldiers their wares (themselves, mostly). Contrary to popular assumption, the term 'hooker' did not originate with camp followers of soldiers commanded by Union General Joseph 'Fighting Joe' Hooker. Although it's true that during General Hooker's era, Washington's many prostitutes were sometimes called 'Hooker's Division,' calling any such woman a hooker predates the Civil War by at least a couple of decades. According to lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, 'hooker' originally referred to prostitutes who worked in Coriear's Hook during the mid-nineteenth century, a section of New York also commonly known as 'the Hook.' They were hookers. Others believe that this appellation originated with the fact that prostitutes said they hooked customers. Their brothels were called hook shops.

"Determining what to call prostitutes has long vexed members of the media, When a play opened in New York in 1934 that included a character called 'The Young Whore,' one newspaper there changed her designation to 'A Young Girl Who has Gone Astray.' Three years later, when Bette Davis played a prostitute in Marked Woman, her character was called a nightclub hostess. In From Here to Eternity (1953), the prostitute played by Donna Reed (yes, that Donna Reed) was referred to as simply a hostess, In the euphemism business, vagueness reigns.

"At one time, model could be a euphemism for 'prostitute.' ('Model for hire.') Today, to the dismay of legitimate masseuses, their job title often doubles as such a euphemism. More often, contemporary call girls call themselves escorts, a term Amy Fisher - who once worked for an escort service - called 'prostitution lite.' In the Philippines, Guest Relation Officer, or GRO, is a euphemism for 'prostitute.' Teenage girls in Hong Kong, who go on paid 'dates' with older men that may involve sex, call this compensated dating.

"One of the most forlorn euphemisms for compensated sex that I've ever seen was in a news article about South Asian women who'd been laid off from factory jobs. Asked what she and her colleagues were doing now, one said that a young coworker was engaged in 'making men happy.' "

delanceyplace.com 1/24/11 - teddy roosevelt

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:07:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, a New Yorker born to extraordinary wealth, was the first master of the political imagery made possible by the new mediums of photography and mass produced books. He used this skill adroitly in his rise to be America's 26th president:

"Teddy was an oddity in nineteenth-century Albany. Politics at that time was a game played by beer- and whiskey-drinking men, not aristocrats. To New York's political press and players, Teddy was a shrimp-size dandy, dressed in tight-fitting, tailor-made suits, a rich daddy's boy who read books and collected butterflies. Teddy made a bad first impression when he appeared on the assembly floor dressed in a purple satin suit, speaking in a high-pitched, Harvard-tinged voice. The other assemblymen took one look at the rich kid and laughed.

"In 1880s Albany, it would have been acceptable to be wanting in areas of intelligence or legislative ability. But being seen as effeminate was a death sentence for an aspiring politician. This was, after all, forty years before American women were even allowed to vote. Roosevelt's assembly colleagues hung the demeaning nickname 'Oscar Wilde' on him, a mocking reference to the disgraced British homosexual. One newspaper went further, speculating whether Theodore was 'given to sucking the knob of an ivory cane.'

"During the years 1884 to 1901 - from the time young Teddy thought of how to reform his effeminate image to when he became a manly man president - William Cody's extravaganza Buffalo Bill's Wild West was the leading cultural sensation in the United States.. ... Recognizing that a frontier adventure of his own could remedy his wimpish reputation, Roosevelt galloped west, following Buffalo Bill's tracks. Thus began one of America's great political makeovers. After returning to Manhattan in 1884, Teddy boasted to the New York Tribune: 'It would electrify some of my friends who have accused me of presenting the kid-glove element in politics if they could see me galloping over the plains, day in and day out, clad in a buck-skin shirt and leather chaparajos, with a big sombrero on my head.' Wrote Roosevelt, 'For a number of years I spent most of my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman. ... We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red ... exactly as did the pioneers.' ...

"In fact, Roosevelt had commuted west aboard deluxe Pullman cars, staying for short periods of time to check on his investments and gather material for his books. Ranchman Teddy was to Theodore Roosevelt what Buffalo Bill was to William Cody: a spectacular fiction concocted with an audience in mind. [In 1885], Teddy published Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. Three years later, he published Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. Both books were action packed, beautifully illustrated adventure tales about the 'real' West. ...

"Until his death, Teddy would repeat these mythical accounts of his Western adventures, passing them along as fact. But despite his claims to the contrary, Roosevelt spent the majority of his 'Western years' in Manhattan. Notes John Milton Cooper Jr. in The Warrior and the Priest, 'His commitment to western ways was neither permanent nor deep. Between the summers of 1884 and 1886 he spent a total of fifteen months on his ranch. He did not stay for an entire winter in either year; his longest stretch there came between March and July 1886. The rest of the time he shuttled back and forth to the East Coast.'...

"Teddy's ranches went bust within two years and he finally abandoned the West. By the end of 1886, half his inheritance was gone. Teddy knew his ranching days were over. John Milton Cooper Jr. writes: 'In his subsequent career on the national scene, no aspect of Roosevelt's life except his war service made him more of a popular figure than his western sojourn. Nothing did more to make him appear a man of the people. He himself liked to recount how ranching had augmented politics in ridding him of all snobbish inclinations. Actually, his experience was more complicated. In going west, Roosevelt was following a well-beaten track among the upper crust on both sides of the Atlantic. One of his Dakota neighbors was a French marquis, while two others maintained dude ranches for scions of the best British and American families.'

"Teddy's frontier life was more soft blankets than barbwire, but Roosevelt skillfully projected a different reality. Hermann Hagedorn - the first director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association - describes Teddy's author photo for Hunting Trips of a Ranchman: 'He solemnly dressed himself up in the buckskin shirt and the rest of [his] elaborate costume ... and had himself photographed [in a Manhattan studio]. There is something hilariously funny... The imitation grass not quite concealing the rug beneath.' ... In 1886 - one year into the creation of the Ranchman myth - Roosevelt ran for mayor of New York. Newspapers hailed the 'blizzard-seasoned constitution' of the 'Cowboy of the Dakotas.' "

delanceyplace.com 1/21/11 - the crystal palace

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 07:56:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the Crystal Palace of London, one of the greatest architectural triumphs of the nineteenth century, the largest building in the world at its completion, and a building whose design influence remains pervasive even today:

"In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals. For the short time of its existence, it was the biggest building on Earth. Known formally as the Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, it was incontestably magnificent, but all the more so for being so sudden, so startlingly glassy, so gloriously and unexpectedly there. Douglas Jerrold, a columnist for the weekly magazine Punch, dubbed it the Crystal Palace, and the name stuck.

"It had taken just five months to build. It was a miracle that it was built at all. Less than a year earlier it had not even existed as an idea. The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole. ... In 1849, Cole visited the Paris Exhibition - and ... persuaded many worthies, including Prince Albert, to get excited about the idea of a great exhibition [for London], and on January 11, 1850, they held their first meeting with a view to opening on May 1 of the following year. This gave them slightly less than fifteen months to design and erect the largest building ever envisioned, attract and install tens of thousands of displays from every quarter of the globe, fit out restaurants and restrooms, employ staff, arrange insurance and police protection, print up handbills, and do a million other things, in a country that wasn't at all convinced it wanted such a costly and disruptive production in the first place. It was a patently unachievable ambition, and for the next several months they patently failed to achieve it. In an open competition, 245 designs for the exhibition hall were submitted. All were rejected as unworkable. ...

"Into this unfolding crisis stepped the calm figure of Joseph Paxton, head gardener of Chatsworth House, principal seat of the Duke of Devonshire. ... When he learned that the commissioners of the Great Exhibition were struggling to find a design for their hall, it occurred to him that something like his [garden] hothouses might work. While chairing a meeting of a committee of the Midland Railway, he doodled a rough design on a piece of blotting paper and had completed drawings ready for review in two weeks. ... The architectural consultants pointed out, not unreasonably, that Paxton was not a trained architect and had never attempted anything on this scale before, But then, of course, no one had. ...

"So the risks were considerable and keenly felt, yet after only a few days of fretful hesitation the commissioners approved Paxton's plan. Nothing—really, absolutely nothing—says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener. Paxton's Crystal Palace required no bricks at all—indeed, no mortar, no cement, no foundations. It was just bolted together and sat on the ground like a tent, This was not merely an ingenious solution to a monumental challenge but also a radical departure from anything that had ever been tried before.

"The central virtue of Paxton's airy palace was that it could be prefabricated from standard parts. At its heart was a single component—a cast-iron truss three feet wide and twenty-three feet, three inches long—which could be fitted together with matching trusses to make a frame in which to hang the building's glass—nearly a million square feet of it, or a third of all the glass normally produced in Britain in a year. A special mobile platform was designed that moved along the roof supports, enabling workmen to install eighteen thousand panes of glass a week—a rate of productivity that was, and is, a wonder of efficiency. ... In every sense the project was a marvel. ...

"The finished building was precisely 1,851 feet long (in celebration of the year), 408 feet across, and almost 110 feet high along its central spine—spacious enough to enclose a much admired avenue of elms that would otherwise have had to be felled. Because of its size, the structure required a lot of inputs—293,655 panes of glass, 33,000 iron trusses, and tens of thousands of feet of wooden flooring—yet thanks to Paxton's methods, the final cost came in at an exceedingly agreeable 80,000 British pounds. From start to finish, the work took just under thirty-five weeks. St. Paul's Cathedral had taken thirty-five years."

delanceyplace.com 1/20/11 - 'no mas'

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:16:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - one of the most famous boxing matches in the history of the sport was the 1980 rematch between Olympic champion Sugar Ray Leonard and the Panamanian legend Roberto Duran. Duran, who was perhaps boxing's fiercest fighter and who had bested Leonard in their first fight, stunned Leonard and the sporting world and brought disgrace upon himself when he simply quit mid-fight, declaring "No mas" (no more):

"Duran's surrender was so stunning that it all but overshadowed the brilliance of Leonard's performance, but Ray pointed out 'I made him quit - and making Roberto Duran quit was even better than knocking him out. The fact that he quit, and the way he did it, doesn't take anything away from my victory. I'm the champion because he couldn't change and I could.' ...

"The morning after the No Mas fight, [Panama's dictator] Gen. Omar Torrijos angrily ordered Duran and his entire thirty-six-member traveling party to return to Panama immediately, but the boxer ignored his country's ruler and went to Miami instead. It was weeks later that he went back to Panama, only to discover that in his absence his mother's home had been vandalized, his own house stoned. Newspapers questioned not only his courage but his masculinity. A makeshift billboard reading 'Duran Is a Traitor' was painted on the seawall alongside La Avenue Balboa in Panama City. He heard himself described variously as un cobarde (a coward), una gallina (a chicken), and as simply maricon or homosexual.

"And in perhaps the unkindest cut of all, the Panamanian government had repealed the special tax exemption it had granted Duran as a 'National Hero.' When he came home and tried to cash his $8 million letter of credit, the government grabbed the first $2 million off the top.

"Whatever might actually have been going on in Roberto Duran's mind when he said "No mas," he could hardly have anticipated the consequences. He became the butt of jokes, and even his most ardent admirers deserted him in droves. 'His image had been destroyed in a single moment,' said Bobby Goodman. 'When he got back to Panama, he didn't even dare show his face. He lived like a prisoner in his own home.' ...

"It was in any case a moment that would haunt Duran for the rest of his life. Worse still, he had turned his despised adversary into a boxing hero. Sugar Ray Leonard would no longer be regarded as boxing's pretty boy. He had added a new scalp to his collection. He was now the man who had made Roberto Duran quit."

delanceyplace.com 1/19/11 - vaudeville

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:16:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - vaudeville, the circuit of variety acts that went from town to town from the early 1880s until the early 1930s and was America's most popular form of entertainment until nudged aside by the ascendance of cinema and radio. In the 1920s, Louise Hovick, later world famous as the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, was hustled from one theater to the next, overshadowed by her baby sister June, dominated by her mother Rose, deprived of teachers and dental care, but exposed to the assortment of oddities and wonders only the world of vaudeville could provide:

"Louise was the only child who'd spent any time, no matter how brief, in a formal classroom, but Rose believed the circuit taught everything they - and she - needed to know. Consistency was the key to success in vaudeville, polishing an act until it became the prettiest, shiniest version of itself. Consider how many times Chaz Chase, the 'Eater of Strange Things,' consumed lit matches in order to make the trick appear effortless, or the practice schedule of Hadji Ali, the master regurgitator, famous for swallowing a gallon of water followed by a pint of kerosene. After his assistant set up a small metal castle a few feet away, Hadji Ali spat the kerosene in a six-foot stream and set the structure ablaze. He then opened his throat and, with the aim and velocity of a fire hose, purged the water and killed every flame.

delanceyplace.com 1/18/11 - fdr's grandfather

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - whether Caribbean rum, Prohibition-era bootlegging, or Chinese opium, more than a few American and European fortunes have been alleged to come from unexpected sources:

"On March 17, 1905, one of the most significant weddings in American history took place in a house in New York City at 8 East 76th Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues. At 3:30 p.m., [President Theodore Roosevelt's daughter] Miss Alice Roosevelt - serving as a bridesmaid dressed in a white veil and holding a bouquet of pink roses - opened the ceremony as she proceeded down the wide stairs from the third floor to the second-floor salon. The bride - her cousin Eleanor Roosevelt - followed, and behind her was President Theodore Roosevelt, who would give his niece away to the bridegroom, his fifth Cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

"Eleanor wore a pearl necklace and diamonds in her hair, gifts from Franklin's rich Delano relatives. Even though Franklin had never made much money himself, Teddy knew that he would be able to care for his new wife: FDR was heir to the huge Delano opium fortune.

"Franklin's grandfather Warren Delano had for years skulked around [China's] Pearl River Delta dealing drugs. Delano had run offices in Canton and Hong Kong. During business hours, Chinese criminals would pay him cash and receive an opium chit. At night, Scrambling Crabs - long, sleek, heavily armed crafts - rowed out into the Pearl River Delta to Delano's floating warehouses, where they received their Jesus opium under the cover of darkness. The profits were enormous, and at his death Delano left his daughter Sara a fortune that she lavished on her only son.

"The Delanos were not alone. Many of New England's great families made their fortunes dealing drugs in China. The Cabot family of Boston endowed Harvard with opium money, while Yale's famous Skull and Bones society was funded by the biggest American opium dealers of them all - the Russell family. The most famous landmark on the Columbia University campus is the Low Memorial Library, which honors Abiel Low, a New York boy who made it big in the Pearl River Delta and bankrolled the first cable across the Atlantic. Princeton University's first big benefactor, John Green, sold opium in the Pearl River Delta with Warren Delano.

"The list goes on and on: Boston's John Murray Forbes's opium profits financed the career of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company. Thomas Perkins founded America's first commercial railroad and funded the Boston Athenaeum. These wealthy and powerful drug-dealing families combined to create dynasties."

delanceyplace.com 1/14/11 - gutenberg and wine

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - for Johannes Gutenberg, it was the ubiquity of winemakers nearby that helped lead to the invention of the printing press around 1440 CE:

"Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) ... tells the story of a device winemakers had recently invented, a new kind of press that employed a screw to 'concentrate pressure upon broad planks placed over the grapes, which are covered also with heavy weights above.' There is some debate among scholars over whether Pliny may have been rooting for the home team in attributing the invention to his compatriots, since evidence for the use of screw presses in producing wines and olive oils dates back several centuries, to the Greeks. But whatever the exact date of its origin, the practical utility of the screw press, unlike so many great ideas from the Greco-Roman period, ensured that it survived intact through the Dark Ages.

"When the Renaissance finally blossomed, more than a millennium after Pliny's demise, Europe had to rediscover Ptolemaic astronomy and the secrets of building aqueducts. But they didn't have to relearn how to press grapes. In fact, they'd been tinkering steadily with the screw press all along, improving on the model, and optimizing it for the mass production of wines. By the mid-1400s, the Rhineland region of Germany, which historically had been hostile to viticulture for climate reasons, was now festooned with vine trellises. Fueled by the increased efficiency of the screw press, German vineyards reached their peak in 1500, covering roughly four times as much land as they do in their current incarnation. It was hard work producing drinkable wine in a region that far north, but the mechanical efficiency of the screw press made it financially irresistible.

"Sometime around the year 1440, a young Rhineland entrepreneur began tinkering with the design of the wine press. He was fresh from a disastrous business venture manufacturing small mirrors with supposedly magical healing powers, which he intended to sell to religious pilgrims. (The scheme got derailed, in part by bubonic plague, which dramatically curtailed the number of pilgrims.) The failure of the trinket business proved fortuitous, however, as it sent the entrepreneur down a much more ambitious path. He had immersed himself in the technology of Rhineland vintners, but Johannes Gutenberg was not interested in wine. He was interested in words.

"As many scholars have noted, Gutenberg's printing press was a classic combinatorial innovation, more bricolage than breakthrough. Each of the key elements that made it such a transformative machine - the movable type, the ink, the paper, and the press itself - had been developed separately well before Gutenberg printed his first Bible. Movable type, for instance, had been independently conceived by a Chinese blacksmith named Pi Sheng four centuries before. But the Chinese (and, subsequently, the Koreans) failed to adapt the technology for the mass production of texts, in large part because they imprinted the letterforms on the page by hand rubbing, which made the process only slightly more efficient than your average medieval scribe. Thanks to his training as a goldsmith, Gutenberg made some brilliant modifications to the metallurgy behind the movable type system, but without the press itself, his meticulous lead fonts would have been useless for creating mass-produced Bibles.

"An important part of Gutenberg's genius, then, lay not in conceiving an entirely new technology from scratch, but instead from borrowing a mature technology from an entirely different field, and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem. We don't know exactly what chain of events led Gutenberg to make that associative link; few documentary records remain of Gutenberg's life between 1440 and 1448, the period during which he assembled the primary components of his invention. But it is clear that Gutenberg had no formal experience pressing grapes. His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland winemaking culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology. He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication.

"Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation."

delanceyplace.com 1/13/11 - the harlem renaissance

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - Duke Ellington (1899-1974), one of the most influential composers in jazz, if not in all American music, and the Harlem Renaissance. In the early twentienth century, there was an outpouring of American black literature, painting, and music known as the Harlem Renaissance. This movement faced its own challenges though, especially the continued burden of prejudice, and exclusion along with the artistic tension between emulating white forms of art and pursuing a more 'authentic' black art:

"The Harlem Renaissance, insofar as [NAACP founder] W.E.B. Du Bois and others defined it, aspired to create an African-American version of 'high culture.' By the early thirties, that mission was becoming more difficult to sustain. A terrible riot in 1935 exposed the misery and rage behind the illusion of an upwardly mobil black culture.

"As Paul Allen Anderson explains in his book Deep River, a split opened between the original leaders of the Renaissance and younger artists such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who disavowed what Hughes called the 'Nordicized Negro intelligentsia' and sought a less status-conscious, less politely affirmative definition of black culture. Du Bois and his colleagues had dreamed ... of a 'hybridic fusion' of African-American, mainstream-American, and European ideas. ... By contrast the young rebel Hughes celebrated the authenticity of 'hot' jazz and rural blues. ...

"The split between the Harlem Renaissance elders and the new radical Negroes formed the backdrop for Duke Ellington's career. Like Gershwin, Ellington had a flair for ambivalence. He partook of Du Bois and Locke's cosmopolitanism, their rhetoric of uplift and transcendence. Yet he also adopted Hughes's slogans of resistance and subversion.

"There's a wonderful scene in a 1944 New Yorker profile in which Ellington is shown deflating the expectations of an Icelandic music student who tries to nudge him toward the 'classical genius' category. The student keeps peppering the master with questions about Bach, and before answering Ellington makes an elaborate show of unwrapping a pork chop he has stowed in his pocket. 'Bach and myself' he says, taking a bite from the chop, 'both write with individual performers in mind.' With that pork chop maneuver, Ellington puts distance between himself and the European conception of genius, though without rejecting it entirely. Another time he addressed the issue head-on: 'To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him his rightful share of originality.' ...

"[Antonin] Dvorak had assumed that American music would come into his its own when it succeeded in importing African-American material into European form, but in the end the opposite thing happened: African-American composers appropriated European material into self-invented forms of blues and jazz."

delanceyplace.com 1/12/11 - the frontier closes

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - war and loneliness. During the final years of World War I, Eric Ludendorff, a protege of Otto von Bismarck himself, was the commanding general of all German armies. His grandiose military plans had failed repeatedly, he had presided over ten million casualties, and in 1918 his forces had begun to rapidly disintegrate:

"Things had never gone so badly for Eric Ludendorff, or gone badly in so many ways over such a long period, as they did in 1918. As his problems mounted, he grew visibly fragile.

"All his life he had displayed an insatiable appetite for work, but now his staff noticed him slipping away from headquarters without explanation. A member of the medical staff, writing of Ludendorff, would recall that at this juncture 'there were reports of occasional crying episodes.'

"Officers who served him became concerned for him personally and about his ability to function. Quietly, with considerable trepidation, they arranged for a psychiatrist who knew Ludendorff, a Dr. Hocheimer, to visit and see what might be done.

"Everyone was on pins and needles the day Hocheimer arrived, wondering how he was going to approach Ludendorff and how the general was going to react. Ludendorff was a stiff, distant man with no visible sense of humor and firm control over all emotion except the rage that could break out in moments of intense stress. An ugly explosion was by no means out of the question. What happened was more unexpected than that. It revealed the depth of Ludendorff's neediness.

"He was predictably impatient at being interrupted but consented to see the doctor. 'I talked earnestly, urgently and warmly, and said that I had noticed with great sadness that for years he had given no consideration to one matter—his own spirit,' Hocheimer recalled afterward. 'Always only work, worry, straining his body and mind. No recreation, no joy, rushing his food, not breathing, not laughing, not seeing anything of nature and art, not hearing the rustle of the forest nor the splashing of the brook.'

"Ludendorff sat for a long time without answering. 'You're right in everything,' he said at last. 'I've felt it for a long time. But what shall I do?'

"Hocheimer urged a move from Ludendorff's cramped quarters at Avesnes back to the more pleasant accommodations at Spa in Belgium. He recommended walks, breathing exercises, and a change in routine calculated to induce relaxation and the ability to sleep. Ludendorff followed these instructions conscientiously, even eagerly. As long as he continued to do so, his torments eased. He and Hocheimer continued to confer. The doctor's ultimate diagnosis: 'The man is utterly lonely.' ...

"Ludendorff was especially close to the youngest of his stepsons, who happened to share his first name. In March 1918 he received word that young Erich, still a teenager, had been shot down behind British lines, his fate uncertain. Not long afterward, with German troops advancing across France in the Michael offensive, Ludendorff was told of the discovery of a fresh grave. Its marker said, in English, 'Here rest two German pilots.' He went to the grave and had the bodies dug up. One was Erich's. It was temporarily reburied at Avesnes while arrangements were made for its transfer to Berlin.

"That was where Ludendorff was going when he began to disappear from headquarters: to brood at Erich's grave. That was when an army doctor heard 'reports of occasional crying.' Nothing could ever be the same. [His wife] Margarethe was broken, permanently in the grip of depression, grief, and fear. Ludendorff, in own words, felt that the war had taken everything."

delanceyplace.com 1/11/11 - the brady bunch

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:39:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in 1966, veteran producer Sherwood Schwartz conceived of a new situation comedy. In an era of perfect families like the one found in Ozzie and Harriet, he would make a show that featured a family with children from a previous marriage. It took years and rejections from all three networks before The Brady Bunch made the airwaves:

"One morning in 1966, I was reading the Los Angeles Times and I came across something that changed my life forever. It wasn't a headline, it was just an item you sometimes see at the end of a column that's not quite long enough to fill a space.

"The item stated that, 'In the year 1965, more than 29 percent of all marriages included a child or children from a previous marriage.'

"I knew instinctively that statistic was the key to a new and unusual TV series. It was a revelation! The first blended family! His kids and her kids! Together!

"I knew I had to get my idea to the Writers Guild in a hurry to register this concept as soon as possible. I was spurred on by the sound of hoof beats in my head - other writers galloping along the same trail, trying to get to the Guild and stake a claim before I did.

"At the time, in the mid-60s, most TV families were fairly predictable with a father, a mother, their children, and sometimes a housekeeper. Shows like My Three Sons, Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, and Father Knows Best had all portrayed the daily life of the traditional American family with conventional plots and resolutions. There was always a major story about the children and a subplot about the parents. But times were changing, and that one little newspaper item was all it took to provide that 'Eureka!' moment that inspired me to create a new kind of TV family - a family that America was not only ready for, but maybe even needed. And I hoped that I would be the first to get the idea out there.

"So I went to the Guild and filled out the paperwork with Blanche Baker, the charming woman there who always greeted each submission with a smiling, 'Good luck.'

"I registered the idea before I even figured out any of the key details of the series, like how many children were in each of the families, or what the father did for a living, or where the families lived, or anything else about the characters or their situation. I don't think I wrote more than seven or eight pages, including several sample storylines, for my submission to the Guild. ...

"Because it wasn't about his kids and her kids, I called it 'Yours & Mine.' Eventually, it became The Brady Bunch."

delanceyplace.com 1/10/11 - the frontier closes

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:36:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced the American frontier closed, reflecting the fact that America now controlled the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the twenty-five year war against the Indians had ended. That, coupled with the economic depression of 1893, formed the background in which America sought to open new frontiers through imperialism - following the lead of England, France, Germany and other European countries by capturing Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and briefly Cuba in the Spanish America War of 1898. It was an era when America had just ascended as the world's wealthiest country; an era when newspapers routinely used the terms "manliness" and "manhood" to describe the highest virtues of politicians and businessmen; an era in which only seven out of almost one hundred countries on the planet were fully independent; and an era in which Rudyard Kipling penned the poem "White Man's Burden" to describe the virtues of Anglo-Saxons and the virtuous aim of colonization:

"One of the historians who arose to explain the success of American expansion was a University of Wisconsin professor named Frederick Jackson Turner, Turner too believed that the northern German forests had formed the Teuton, that the British Isles had formed the Anglo-Saxon, and that American greatness was part of the [Teutonic/Anglo-Saxon] westering. 'Forest philosophy,' he wrote, 'is the philosophy of American democracy [and] the forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character.'

"By this time the United States was a continental nation of seventy-six million people, spread across forty-five states. America occupied more land area than all other countries except Russia and Canada.

"In 1893, the thirty-five-year-old professor Professor Turner, in a speech before the American Historical Association in Chicago, announced, 'Now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.'

"The idea that America's frontier was gone stunned westering White Christians. Roosevelt was one of the first to sense the revolutionary qualities of Turner's thesis. As John Judis explains in The Folly of Empire, 'For Roosevelt ... the closing of the frontier [meant] the loss of those elements in national life that made Americans virile and vigorous, stimulated their taste and aptitude for competition, and gave them a strong and unifying sense of ... solidarity. Roosevelt worried that with the absence of battle, Americans would grow soft and overcivilized. ...'

"In addition to concerns about the end of the frontier, in 1893 the United States economy sank into its worst depression ever. Six hundred forty-two banks closed and an incredible sixteen thousand companies shuttered their doors. The most actively traded company on the New York Stock Exchange - National Cordage - went belly-up. Giant pillars of the economy such as the Northern Pacific Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad crumbled. America had experienced economic downturns before, but this was much bigger, lasting for four frightening years, from 1893 to 1898. At one point, four million workers were idle - more than one-fourth of a labor force of fifteen million - at a time of no government support for the unemployed.

"Not surprisingly, anxiety about overcivilization increased. Kristin Hoganson, associate professor of history at the University of Illinois, writes in Fighting for American Manhood, 'The depression of 1893 exacerbated anxieties about manhood, for unemployment resulting from the depression led to fears of male dependency. Rather than providing for their families, as men were expected to do, thousands failed to fulfill this basic male responsibility.'

"Overseas expansion was seen as a cure-all for the triple whammy of overcivilization, economic depression, and the end of the frontier. Battling Others for their land would enhance the American male's barbarian virtues and secure profitable markets. ...

"The United States was not the first White Christian country to the imperial feeding frenzy. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain had fifty colonies, France thirty-three, and Germany thirteen. More than 98 percent of Polynesia was colonized, 90 percent of Africa, and more than 56 percent of Asia. Across this broad swath of planet, only seven countries were still fully independent nations. senator Henry Cabot Lodge expressed America's 'empire envy': 'The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. It is a movement which makes for civilization and the advancement of the race. As one of the great nations of the world, the United States must not fall out of the line of march."

delanceyplace.com 1/7/11 - the taj mahal

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - the Taj Mahal, the architectural masterpiece of the Islamic ruler of India, Shah Jehan:

"A brutal, wasteful, and ruthless emperor, who ordered the killing of all his male relations who might possibly claim the throne, Shah Jehan (ruled 1627-1658 CE) also had a passion for architecture, and he imported Italian artists who taught his craftsmen the art of inlaying marble with a mosaic of precious stones. He built forts with luxurious halls bearing panels of Florentine mosaic on black marble, as well as ceilings and arches carved with such skill they looked like lace. However, he is mostly remembered for the hauntingly beautiful Taj Mahal, a tribute to his eternal love for his beauteous queen, Mumtaz Mahal (Exalted of the Palace). Mumtaz gave her husband fourteen children in eighteen years and died in childbirth at the age of thirty-nine.

"In 1632, the mausoleum was built for the queen by the inconsolable Shah Jehan. There is no trace of Hindu influence. Artisans were brought from Baghdad, Constantinople, and other centers of the Muslim faith. It took twenty-two years and twenty-two thousand laborers and craftsmen from India, Asia, and Europe to build the white marble Taj. The building is set in a Persian landscaped garden on the banks of the Yamuna River. The Taj Mahal is exquisitely proportioned, with minarets and a central dome mirrored in a reflecting pool. It features perforated marble grilles, semiprecious stones (including jasper, lapis lazuli, and bloodstone) inlaid in marble, as well as arabesques and chevrons. There is hardly abreak between the stones. One flower an inch square can have sixty different inlays. The Taj Mahal reflects the varying moods of night and day: brilliant and dazzling at noon, warm and glowing at dusk, and ethereal in the moonlight. The main entrance was once guarded with heavy silver gates. The stone carving is of alabaster lace, beautiful and sublime with delicate detail.

"Another legendary work of art created at this time was the Peacock Throne, which took seven years to complete. It was legendary for its components of precious metals and stones. Four legs of gold supported the seat, and twelve pillars of emeralds held up the enameled canopy, while each pillar bore two peacocks glittering with rubies and pearls. Between the peacocks was a tree, covered with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and pearls. The fabled throne was carried off to Persia in 1739 by Nadir Shah and then was gradually dismantled to pay off the expenses of the royal personages.

"Yet another project on a grand scale, the Red Fort (Lal Kila) - of red sandstone - was built in Delhi in 1640. It includes towering ramparts, factories, storehouses, military barracks, stables, and a mint. It housed thousands of servants, courtiers, and princesses. A magnificent mosque, Jama Masjid, was built facing the main entrance. Every Friday, tens of thousands of Muslims in India still gather here to pray at noon.

"Shah Jehan, the most lavish spender of the Moghul emperors, ruled for three decades. He began his reign by killing his brothers but neglected to kill his sons, one of whom, Aurangzeb, not only overthrew him but imprisoned him. Shah Jehan languished in prison for eight years, looking sorrowfully through a grille at his creation, the Taj Malial, where the body of his beloved rested."

delanceyplace.com 1/6/11 - our american ancestors

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the very early British colonizers of America in the 1600s and 1700s needed laborers for their new colonies, and so turned in many cases to convicts, children and other forced migrants:

"[Early British colonizers] needed a compliant, subservient, preferably free labour force, and since the indigenous peoples of America were difficult to enslave they turned to their own homeland to provide. They imported Britons deemed to be 'surplus' people - the rootless, the unemployed, the criminal and the dissident - and held them in the Americas in various forms of bondage for anything from three years to life. ... In the early decades, half of them died in bondage.

"Among the first to be sent were children. Some were dispatched by impoverished parents seeking a better life for them. But others were forcibly deported. In 1618, the authorities in London began to sweep up hundreds of troublesome urchins from the slums, and ignoring protests from the children and their families, shipped them to Virginia. ... It was presented as an act of charity: the 'starving children' were to be given a new start as apprentices in America. In fact, they were sold to planters to work in the fields, and half of them were dead within a year. Shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades. Many of these migrants were little more than toddlers. In 1661, the wife of a man who imported four 'Irish boys' into Maryland as servants wondered why her husband had not brought 'some cradles to have rocked them in' as they were 'so little.'

"A second group of forced migrants from the mother country were those such as vagrants and petty criminals whom England's rulers wished to be rid of. The legal ground was prepared for their relocation by a highwayman turned Lord Chief Justice who argued for England's jails to be emptied in America. Thanks to men like him, 50,000 to 70,000 convicts (or maybe more) were transported to Virginia, Maryland, Barbados, and England's other American possessions before 1776. ...

"A third group were the Irish. ... Under Oliver Cromwell's ethnic-cleansing policy in Ireland, unknown numbers of Catholic men women and children were forcibly transported to the colonies. And it did not end with Cromwell; for at least another hundred years, forced transportation continued as a fact of life in Ireland. ...

"The other unwilling participants in the colonial labour force were the kidnapped. Astounding numbers are reported to have been snatched from the streets and countryside by gangs of kidnappers or 'spirits' working to satisfy the colonial hunger for labour. Based at every sizeable port in the British Isles, spirits conned or coerced the unwary onto ships bound for America. ... According to a contemporary who campaigned against the black slave trade, kidnappers were snatching an average of around 10,000 whites a year - doubtless an exaggeration, but one that indicates a problem serious enough to create its own grip on the popular mind.' "

delanceyplace.com 1/5/11 - the ottoman empire

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - starting with its founding by Osman in 1299, the Ottoman Empire was ruled for ten successive generations by capable and often brilliant leaders, culminating in the dazzling reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1494-1566), who led the Empire to its cultural and geographic zenith. That changed when his son Mustafa was executed—by five professional executioners whose tongues had been slit and eardrums broken so that they would hear no secrets and could never speak of what they saw—and replaced by his wife's favorite, Selim II. Selim was followed by a succession of mostly degenerate and weak leaders that left the Empire, by 1914, as the "sick man of Europe":

"Suleiman, a contemporary of Henry VIII of England, took his strange heritage to a peak of vitality. Like his forebears, he was a warrior, personally leading his army in thirteen campaigns. He pushed deeper into Europe, capturing Belgrade and Budapest and completing the conquest of the Balkans. He besieged Vienna, the keystone of central Europe, and would have captured it too if torrents of rain had not made it impossible for him to bring his heavy guns north. He was a poet, a student of the works of Aristotle, and a builder who made Constantinople grander and more beautiful than it had ever been. The opulence of life in his Topkapi Palace beggars the imagination.

"Suleiman had some three hundred concubines, as well as a promising young son and heir named Mustafa, when he was given a red-haired Russian girl named Ghowrem, who came to be known as Roxelana. She came into his harem as part of his share of the booty from a slave-gathering raid into what is now Poland, and she must have been a remarkable creature. (Not surprisingly, in light of the power she acquired in Constantinople, she eventually won a second new name: 'the witch.') Almost from the day of her arrival, Suleiman never slept with another woman. Eventually and amazingly, he did something that no sultan had done in centuries: he married. Their love story would have been one of the great ones if it hadn't ended up taking the dynasty and the empire in such a sordid direction.

"Mustafa gave every indication of developing into yet another mighty branch on the family tree. At an early age he showed himself a bold military leader adored by his troops, a capable provincial governor, and a popular hero. But he stood in the way of the son whom Roxelana had borne to (presumably) Suleiman, and so he was doomed. Working her wiles, Roxelana persuaded Suleiman that Mustafa was plotting against him. (He was doing nothing of the kind.) With his father looking on, Mustafa was overpowered and strangled by five professional executioners whose tongues had been slit and eardrums broken so that they would hear no secrets and could never speak of what they saw. And so when Suleiman died some years later, master of an empire of almost incredible size and power, he was succeeded by Roxelana's son, Selim II. Nothing was ever the same again.

"Selim the Sot was short and fat and a drunk. He never saw a battlefield and died after eight years on the throne by falling down and fracturing his skull in his marble bath. His son, Murad III, was also a drunk and an opium addict as well; during a reign of twenty years he sired 103 children and apparently did little else. His heir, Mahomet III, began his reign by ordering all of his many brothers, the youngest of them mere children, put to death, thereby introducing that custom into Ottoman royal culture. Having done so he followed his father in devoting the rest of his life to copulation. And so it went. Every sultan from Roxelana's son forward was a monster of degeneracy or a repulsive weakling or both. The abruptness and permanence of the change, the sharpness of the contrast between the murdered Mustafa and his half-brother Selim II, has given rise to speculation that perhaps Roxelana's son was not Suleiman's son at all.

"In the post-Suleiman empire, a new breed of craven sultans came to live in terror of being overthrown by rivals from within the dynasty. Appalling new traditions emerged, to be observed whenever one of them died. All the women of the deceased sultan would be moved to a distant place and kept in even deeper solitude for the rest of their miserable lives. Any who happened to be pregnant would be murdered (generally by being bundled in sacks and drowned), and the younger brothers and half-brothers of the new monarch (often a large number of men, boys, and infants) were murdered as well (generally by strangulation).

"The rulers erected a windowless building called the Cage in which their heirs were confined from early childhood until they died or were put to death or, having been taught nothing about anything, were released to take their turns on the throne. The result was as inevitable as it was monstrous: an empire ruled year after year and finally century after century by utterly ignorant, utterly incompetent, sometimes half-imbecilic, half-mad men, some of whom spent decades in the Cage before their release and all of whom, after their release, were free to do absolutely anything they wanted, no matter how vicious, for as long as they remained alive. They commonly indulged their freedom to kill or maim anyone they wished to kill or maim for any reason—for playing the wrong music or for smoking, for example—or for no reason at all."

delanceyplace.com 1/4/11 - this land is your land

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:05:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - in the wake of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote the song "This Land is Your Land," a satire and protest against what he saw as the unrealistic vision of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." It was originally titled "God Bless America for Me," and the original chorus used that line instead of "this land was made for you and me." Guthrie eventually deleted two verses, perhaps because he knew he couldn't get the song published otherwise - one that lamented the lack of help provided by America's churches for the poor, and the other his protest against the idea of private property (read those verses after the author credit below):

The original last two verses of "This Land is Your Land":

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

delanceyplace.com 12/31/10 - the delanceyplace end-of-year comedy week

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 00:15:00 -0500

The Delanceyplace End-of-Year Comedy Week

In today's encore excerpt - the lives of superstar comedians George Carlin and Richard Pryor bear witness to the pain beneath much of our humor:

"[George Carlin's] father, an ad salesman, was a drinker prone to violent outbursts, and when George was only two, his mother grabbed him and his older brother, fled down the fire escape, and left for good. Mary Carlin and her boys spent two years shuttling among friends and relatives, before finally getting an apartment of their own—with George's father stalking them all the way. 'He hounded her,' says Carlin. 'And he frightened her. When we lived on One Hundred Fortieth Street, we would come back from downtown, get off the subway, and the procedure was, my mother would go to the call box, get the local precinct, and say, 'Hi, it's Mary and the kids. I'm at One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street. Come and get us.' And they would drive us home and see us into the house. Sometimes, he'd be across the street, just looking.' Even when they finally moved into an apartment that his father didn't know the whereabouts of, his mother was still on edge. If they got an unexpected knock, she'd tell George to peek under the door. If he saw a lady's shoes, he could open it. A man's shoes, and they would stay quiet until the visitor went away. This family drama ended only when his father died. George was eight. ...

"He was born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor, on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois. His mother, who appears to have been a prostitute, and his father married when Richard was three and split up when he was ten. He then went to live with his grandmother, who ran a chain of whorehouses in town. In his autobiography, Pryor Convictions, Pryor describes learning about sex by peeking through keyholes to watch the prostitutes at work, and soaking up neighborhood lore at a bar called the Famous Door, where 'people came in to exchange news, blow steam or have their say.' He was kicked out of Catholic school when they found out about the family business, and he moved into an integrated elementary school. There he got an early taste of racism, when he gave a scratch pad as a gift to a little white girl he had a crush on. The next day, as Pryor tells it, the girl's angry father came to school and berated him in front of the class: 'Nigger, don't you ever give my daughter anything.' "

The Delanceyplace End-of-Year Comedy Week

In today's encore excerpt - the lives of superstar comedians George Carlin and Richard Pryor bear witness to the pain beneath much of our humor:

"George Carlin's father, an ad salesman, was a drinker prone to violent outbursts, and when George was only two his mother grabbed him and his older brother fled down the fire escape and left for good. Mary Carlin and her boys spent two years shuttling among friends and relatives before finally getting an apartment of their own - with George's father stalking them all the way. 'He hounded her' says Carlin. 'And he frightened her. When we lived on One Hundred Fortieth Street, we would come back from downtown, get off the subway, and the procedure was my mother would go to the call box get the local precinct and say 'Hi it's Mary and the kids. I'm at One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street. Come and get us.' And they would drive us home and see us into the house. Sometimes he'd be across the street just looking.' Even when they finally moved into an apartment that his father didn't know the whereabouts of, his mother was still on edge. If they got an unexpected knock she'd tell George to peek under the door. If he saw a lady's shoes, he could open it. A man's shoes and they would stay quiet until the visitor went away. This family drama ended only when his father died. George was eight. ...

"He was born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois. His mother, who appears to have been a prostitute, and his father married when Richard was three and split up when he was ten. He then went to live with his grandmother, who ran a chain of whorehouses in town. In his autobiography, Pryor Convictions, Pryor describes learning about sex by peeking through keyholes to watch the prostitutes at work, and soaking up neighborhood lore at a bar called the Famous Door where 'people came in to exchange news, blow steam, or have their say.' He was kicked out of Catholic school when they found out about the family business and he moved into an integrated elementary school. There he got an early taste of racism when he gave a scratch pad as a gift to a little white girl he had a crush on. The next day, as Pryor tells it, the girl's angry father came to school and berated him in front of the class: 'Nigger don't you ever give my daughter anything.' "

Author: Richard Zoglin

Title: Comedy at the Edge

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 19-20, 44

Richard Zoglin

delanceyplace.com 12/30/10 - the delanceyplace end-of-year comedy week

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:15:00 -0500

The Delanceyplace End-of-Year Comedy Week

In today's encore excerpt - Groucho Marx, writing at least somewhat seriously on the subject of comics:

"I am not sure how I got to be a comedian or a comic. ... I doubt if any comedian can honestly say why he is funny and why his neighbor is not.

"I believe all comedians arrive by trial and error. This was certainly true in the old days of vaudeville, and I'm sure it's true today. The average team would consist of a straight man and a comic. The straight man would sing, dance, or possibly do both. And the comedian would steal a few jokes from the other acts and find a few in the newspapers and comic magazines. They would then proceed to play small-time vaudeville theaters, burlesque shows, night clubs, and beer gardens. If the comic was inventive, he would gradually discard the stolen jokes and the ones that died, and try out some of his own. In time, if he was any good, he would emerge from the routine character he had started with, and evolve into a distinct personality of his own. This has been my experience and also that of my brothers, and I believe this has been true of most of the other comedians.

"My guess is that there aren't a hundred top-flight professional comedians, male and female, in the whole world. They are a much rarer and far more valuable commodity than all the gold and precious stones in the world. But because we are laughed at, I don't think people understand how essential we are to their sanity. If it weren't for the brief respite we give the world with our foolishness, the world would see mass suicide in numbers that compare favorably with the death rate of lemmings.

"I'm sure most of you have heard the story of the man who, desperately ill, goes to an analyst and tells the doctor that he has lost his desire to live and that he is seriously considering suicide. The doctor listens to this tale of melancholia and then tells the patient that what he needs is a good belly laugh. He advises the unhappy man to go to the circus that night and spend the evening laughing at Grock, the world's funniest clown. The doctor sums it up, 'After you have seen Grock, I am sure you will be much happier.' The patient rises to his feet, looks sadly at the doctor, turns and ambles to the door. As he starts to leave, the doctor says, 'By the way what is your name?' The man turns and regards the analyst with sorrowful eyes. 'I am Grock.' "

delanceyplace.com 12/29/10 - the delanceyplace end-of-year comedy week

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:15:00 -0500

The Delanceyplace End-of-Year Comedy Week

'In today's encore excerpt - just as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, Miner's Theater in the Bowery introduced the hook as a way to forcibly remove unpopular acts from the stage. At that time, the Bowery was exceeded only by Broadway as a place to see live theater in New York:

By the [1890s], the major venue [in the Bowery] was Miner's theater, home to such nascent legends as the young dialect comedy duo Weber and Fields ... and the Four Cohans, from which young George M. eventually graduated. ...

"What made Miner's absolutely unique for a time, however, was Amateur Night, held on alternate Fridays. ... A 1905 account outlines a typical night's fare: a juggler, buck-and-wing dancers, a blackface comedian in a red plaid suit, a clay modeler (incredibly, arts-and-crafts demonstrations carried off with a certain amount of panache and speed went over with the roughest crowds), a quartet of singing newsboys. As entertaining as the acts on stage might be, people often came to amateur nights at Miner's to take in the audience reaction, which could be brutal. ...

"Since the procession of semi-talented and utterly untalented hopefuls could be painful, not to mention boring, an enterprising stage manager at Miner's came up with a way of policing the lengths of unsuccessful acts: the hook. The first one apparently was a stage-prop shepherd's crook lashed to a pole. Before long, hooks were being manufactured. The hook appeared in theaters all over the world, entered the language ... Back at Miner's, 'Give 'im the hook' took barely twenty-four hours to establish itself as the crowd's favorite line. Soon it was a cliche, and stage managers were kept busy hatching entertaining alternatives: dousing performers with selzer from spray bottles, carrying them out on stretchers manned by burly stage hands."

delanceyplace.com 12/28/10 - the delanceyplace end-of-year comedy week

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:15:00 -0500

The Delanceyplace End-of-Year Comedy Week

In today's encore excerpt - Gilda Radner (1946-1989), the much-loved comedian best remembered as part of the original cast of Saturday Night Live who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 43:

"Radner was born in Detroit nine months after the end of World War II to a Russian Jewish family. Her father ran a successful hotel in town, and many famous nightclub entertainers performed there. Gilda, already named after a Rita Hayworth heroine, was starstruck at an early age. The first wall she banged into was her father's death when she was a teenager, and it hit her hard. 'She was also heavy,' recounted Alan Zweibel, another close friend and SNL writer. 'So the death of a Dad and being fat, that was a little bit of a combo platter there that certainly is a really good recipe to be funny. How else do you survive?'

"Gilda went across the border to follow a boyfriend to Canada, worked briefly on a children's television show, and then did improv at Toronto's Second City. She came to New York to perform in the National Lampoon Show where producer Lorne Michaels saw her: she was the first of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players to be hired for Saturday Night Live. Through the first five seasons of the program, Radner became the show's heart, winning the audience over with her gallery of misguided misfits. There seemed to be few risks she was not willing to take, whether it was gluing fake armpit hair on to parody Patti Smith, or slamming full throttle into a bedroom door (or jumping on the bed) as the hyperactive little girl Judy Miller:

" 'And now it's time for the Judy Miller Show!!!!!! Yea!!! And now, presenting the beautiful star of our show - here she is folks, Miss Judy Miller! I am the most beautiful bride in the whole wide world!!!!!'

" 'Part of the charm of Gilda was the child inside of her that she was not afraid to access' said Zweibel. 'She felt comfortable in the world that's in the head of children.'

"Perhaps her greatest risk-taking revolved around her ability to endow each of her unforgettable characters with a humiliating flaw that would have in less sensitive hands consigned them to social marginalization. Her version of Barbara Walters combined a speech impediment with a gargantuan ego: 'I mean wewwy, who does deserve to be Fiwst Wady? Me, Baba Wawa, Fiwst Wady of tewevision.' Emily Litella, the 'Weekend Update' contributor incapable of getting the simplest facts straight, was continually railing against 'Violins on Television' or 'Soviet Jewelry.' There was 'always something' over-the-top about newscaster Roseanne Rosannadanna, who never seemed to understand the most basic rules of taste or etiquette. ...

"No matter how egregious the faux pas of her characters, no matter how goofy they seemed to be, they always thought they were perfectly fine; that's because Radner did too. Anne Beatts remembered that 'She once said that she thought comedy originated for her 'when you're little and you fall down on the ice? And people might laugh at you so you try and make it seem like you fell on purpose?' That was the root of her comedy.' Nowhere was that more apparent than with Lisa Loopner, the girl nerd who, despite the fact that her breasts were in her words 'miserable maraschino cherries,' still radiated an immense sexual attraction to her pizza-faced classmate Todd, played by Bill Murray [who] was 'a boy and a friend but not my boyfriend' ...

"As Gilda's star ascended there were the inevitable rungs in the ladder of crossover success - movies, a one-woman Broadway show - but she always turned down the repeated fervent requests for her to star in her own sitcom. She was happy where she was on SNL, but in 1980 when the original cast left after five seasons, it was time to move on. Her huge fame at the time filled her more with ambivalence than anything else; she told a television reporter that 'it happens a lot in comedy that when you get success and celebrity it changes. There's something about being an underdog, a voyeur, that makes comedy possible.' "

delanceyplace.com 12/27/10 - the delanceyplace end-of-year comedy week

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:15:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the success of Mae West, the scandalously sexy star who was film's most successful comedienne in the first half of the twentieth century. Her personal appearances alone would draw crowds in excess of thirty thousand people. She is known for her seductive line, "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?" spoken to Cary Grant in the movie She Done Him Wrong, and for bawdy double entendres such as "I used to be snow white, but I drifted." Though it seemed that her humor and appeal were effortless, it was her extraordinary work ethic that propelled her to the top:

"Mae West's development as a comedienne was slow and painstaking. A careful reading of the material in her personal archive shows that her collection of quips [comes from] roughly two thousand pages of 'gags', comprising jokes and quips copied out methodically from joke books. These are preserved in over forty folders, containing around twenty thousand jokes. ... [Her] Herculean labour of collection continued over four decades. ...

"This was—in essence—when one peers behind the mask of glamour, hype, publicity and subterfuge, Mae West's great secret: that she went home to her apartment or hotel room at night and wrote, turning out, from the mid-1920s, plays, skits, drafts, rewrites, versions, treatments and synopses. ... Eventually, this would include a vast private library of aphorisms, one-liners and jokes: jokes about love, jokes about men and women, jokes about marriage and the eternal battle of the sexes, jokes about all the aggravations and snags of modern life. ...

" 'She: It's better to be looked over than overlooked.'

'They say that love is blind.'
'Yes, but he has a wonderful sense of touch.'

'You can trust me.'
'I'm not looking for a man I can trust.'

'How did you ever come to fall for him?'
'I guess his line was just low enough to trip.'

'Do you prefer men who are a trifle wicked?'
'Wicked but not trifling.'

'A girl may love you from the bottom of her heart, but there's always room for some other guy at the top.'

'Sex didn't begin in Hollywood—it just went there to get in the movies.' "

delanceyplace.com 12/24/10 - serving cat for christmas

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:02:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the Siege of Paris or L'Annee Terrible was the overthrow and humiliation of Paris in 1870 by Bismarck after France had declared war on Prussia. Food supplies became so short that one man reported that was fattening up a large cat which he planned to serve up on Christmas Day 'surrounded with mice like sausages.' The Siege occurred because France, still limping from the excesses of Napoleon, showed enough hubris to declare war on Prussia over a mere diplomatic incident - the proposed placement of a German prince on the Spanish throne ('The Liberal Empire goes to war on a mere point of etiquette'). Bismarck judged rightly that a war on France would enable him to bond together the loose structure of the German federation into a truly unified nation. Bismarck won after a siege that brought Parisians to the cruel brink of starvation and he extracted as reparations Alsace Lorraine and five billion francs - a price which bitterly helped lead to both World Wars. Upon the German's departure, France imploded into a civil war that left 25,000 Parisians dead - more than in the Terror itself:

"By early October [1870], even bourgeois Paris had turned to horsemeat. ... As hunger tightened its grip, so many a splendid champion of the turf came to a well-spiced end in the casserole. Among them were two trotting horses presented by the Tsar to Louis Napoleon at the time of the Great Exposition which were originally valued at 56,000 francs but now bought by a butcher for 800. It was in mid-November, however, that supplies of fresh meat were exhausted - and it was then that Parisians invented the exotic menus with which the siege will always be linked. The signs 'Feline and Canine Butchers' made their first appearance. To begin with, dog-loving Parisians objected fiercely to slaughtering domestic pets for human consumption, but soon necessity overcame their fastidiousness. By mid-December [columnist] Henry Labouchere ... was telling his readers 'I had a slice of spaniel the other day,' adding that it made him 'feel like a cannibal.' A week later he reported that he had encountered a man who was fattening up a large cat which he planned to serve up on Christmas Day 'surrounded with mice like sausages.' ...

"And then it was rats. Along with the carrier-pigeon, the rat was to become the most fabled animal of the Siege of Paris, and from December, the National Guard spent much of its time engaged in vigorous rat-hunts. ... The elaborate sauces that were necessary to render them edible meant that rats were essentially a rich man's dish - hence the notorious menus of the Jockey Club which featured such delicacies as salmis de rats and rat pie.

"As the weeks passed, Parisian diets grew even more outlandish as the zoos started to offer up their animals. ... By early January [a young Englishman named Tommy Bowles] was noting 'I have now dined off camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule, and elephant, which I approve in the order in which I have written, ... horse is really too disgusting and it has a peculiar taste never to be forgotten.' His was not the only palate that became more discriminating: there was a significant variation in price between brewery and sewer rats. ... A lamb offered to one British correspondent ironically proved to be a wolf. ...

"Oddly enough there was never any shortage of wine or other alcohol."

delanceyplace.com 12/23/10 - kids can be cruel

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - The Mickey Mouse Club television show was cancelled in 1958 after three seasons, and almost all the Mouseketeers, who were pre-teens and teenagers, found themselves out of work and trying to reenter normal life. Very few received help from Disney or were able to sustain careers in the entertainment world, and most went on to lives filled with disappointment. Even returning to their former schools proved daunting:

"This conflict first played itself out in the halls of the schools to which the Mouseketeers were hoping to return quietly and without incident. Kids in Karen Pendleton's seventh-grade class would ask her for her autograph, but when the guileless middle-schooler would give it to them, they'd tear it up in front of her. 'What a time to go back to school,' she says. 'There were so many kids who were mean to me. They'd gather around me at lunchtime, and the vice principal would have to come and get me out. It did no wonders for my self-esteem, which was already low anyway.' Her classmates would say things like, 'Wiggle your ears and I'll give you some cheese.' Some boys threw a worm at her. All she could do was wait for the novelty of torturing a former Mouseketeer to wear off, which would take longer than she'd hoped: 'Even through high school and a couple of times in college, people would still say things to me. And dating was hard. It was hard to do, to be attached to a Mouse.'

"Don Agrati, a tiny thirteen-year-old, acquired the nickname 'Mouse' the second he returned to public school and suffered from the same unoriginal - though still hurtful - teasing methods his first love, Karen, was also enduring. Kids would sing 'The Mickey Mouse Club March' whenever he entered the cafeteria. 'I was in fights every day and I was just miserable,' he recalls. 'So my parents took me out of the school. They said, 'You know what, you need to start over again. And the same thing's going to happen. You have to respond, react differently this time.' The same thing, the exact same thing, happened the first day I was at the cafeteria in the new school. I walked in, they started singing The Mickey Mouse Club song. But this time I just joined in. And it worked. That was it. I just needed to do that once and it was like they saw that I was fun and it was over.'

"Tommy Cole had to switch schools too because of his ex-Mouseketeer status. His hometown school wasn't forgiving of the classwork he'd missed while on The Mickey Mouse Club, even though he'd been attending to his studies in the studio-lot trailers as required by law. He tried to return to John Muir High School in Pasadena, but he couldn't catch a break. 'John Muir had no idea what a show kid was, none whatsoever,' he recalls. 'They did not give me a bit of slack on anything. They gave me a real hard time, and my parents finally pulled me out of there. I finished up my high school at Hollywood Professional School because they understand showbiz there."

delanceyplace.com 12/22/10 - charlemagne is crowned on christmas day

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:15:00 -0500

In today's encore excerpt - the Frankish king Charlemagne and the establishment of "A.D." as the basis for calculating dates. Prior to Charlemagne, dating systems had been pegged to a prominent date such as the beginning of a recent or contemporary monarch's rule. Charlemagne began a new system of dating pegged to the birth of Christ, and had himself crowned on Christmas Day to form a dramatic link between his reign and Christ.

At the beginning of the ninth century A.D., with Rome long since crumbled and Constantine's capital still dominant in the East, Charlemagne had built a new Western empire extending across much of modern-day Europe to eclipse it. With that achievement firmly in hand, he came to Rome and knelt during Christmas Mass at the shrine of St. Peter in the Vatican, where Pope Leo suddenly and dramatically crowned him emperor:

"So it was that Charlemagne came to rule as a second Constantine. ... The whole coronation, Charlemagne would later declare, had come as a surprise to him, a bolt from the blue. Indeed 'he made it clear that he would not have entered the cathedral that day at all, although it was the very greatest of the festivals of the Church, if he had known in advance what the Pope was planning to do.' ...

"Yet still an aura of mystery lingered around the ceremony. Had Charlemagne truly been as ignorant of Leo's plans as he subsequently claimed to be, then it was all the more eerie a coincidence that he should have been in Rome and in St. Peter's on the very morning that he was. Eight hundred years had passed to the day since the birth of the Son of Man: an anniversary of which Charlemagne and his advisers would have been perfectly aware. Over the preceding decades, the great program of correctio had begun to embrace even the dimensions of time itself. Traditionally, just as popes had employed the regnal year of the emperor in Constantinople on their documents, so other churchmen had derived dates from a bewildering array of starting points: the accession of their local ruler perhaps, or an ancient persecution, or most extravagantly the creation of the world.

"Such confusion however, to scholars sponsored by the Frankish king, was intolerable. A universal Christian order such as Charlemagne was laboring to raise required a universal chronology. How fortunate it was then that the perfect solution had lain conveniently ready at hand. The years preceding Charlemagne's accession to the Frankish throne had witnessed a momentous intellectual revolution. Monks both in Francia itself and in the British Isles, looking to calibrate the mysterious complexities of time, had found themselves arriving at a framework that was as practical as it was profound. From whose accession date, if not that of some earthly emperor or king, were years to be numbered? The answer once given was obvious. Christ alone was the ruler of all mankind - and His reign had begun when He had first been born into the world. It was the Incarnation - that cosmos-shaking moment when the Divine had become flesh - that served as the pivot around which all of history turned. Where were the Christians who could possibly argue with that? Not at the Frankish court to be sure. Clerics in Charlemagne's service had accordingly begun to measure dates from 'the year of our Lord' - 'anno Domini.'

"Here was a sense of time Christian time that far transcended the local: perfectly suited to a monarchy that extended to the outermost limits of Christendom. Charlemagne crowned upon the exact turning point of a century could hardly have done more to identify himself with it."

delanceyplace.com 12/21/10 - the war of 1812

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:15:00 -0500

In today's excerpt - after the American Revolution, the British maintained their support of the Indians along the western border of the United States, limiting the ability of Americans to expand westward. The American push against this limitation was the cause of the War 1812, though some contemporary textbooks still miss this key point:

"Most textbooks do state that conflict over land was the root cause of our Indian wars. [The widely used textbook] Pathways to the Present, for example, begins its discussion of the War of 1812 by telling how Tecumseh met with Gov. William Henry Harrison of Indiana Territory to complain about whites encroaching upon Indian land. Other recent textbooks likewise emphasize conflict with the Indians, who were seen as backed by the British, as the key cause of this dispute. All along the boundary, from Vermont to the Georgia Piedmont, white Americans wanted to push the boundary of white settlement ever farther into Indian country.

"All but two textbooks miss the key result of the war. Some authors actually cite the 'Star Spangled Banner' as the main outcome! Others claim that the war left 'a feeling of pride as a nation' or 'helped Americans to win European respect.' The textbook The American Adventure excels, pointing out, 'The American Indians were the only real losers in the war,' Triumph of the American Nation expresses the same sentiments, but euphemistically: 'After 1815 the American people began the exciting task of occupying the western lands.' All the other [widely-used] textbooks miss the key outcome: in return for our leaving Canada alone, Great Britain gave up its alliances with American Indian nations in what would become the United States. Without war materiel and other aid from European allies, future Indian wars were transformed from major international conflicts to domestic mopping-up operations. This result was central to the course of Indian-U.S. relations for the remainder of the century. Thus Indian wars after 1815, while they cost thousands of lives on both sides, would never again amount to a serious threat to the United States. Although Native Americans won many battles in subsequent wars, there was never the slightest doubt over who would win in the end. ...

"Even terminology changed [as a result of the War of 1812]: until 1815 the word Americans had generally been used to refer to Native Americans; after 1815 it meant European Americans."