As one of the first American journalists to arrive in Berlin after the end of the Second World War, John Dos Passos was embarrassed by the devastation the American B29s had inflicted. At Stettiner Station he saw large crowds of bewildered people, their skin hanging on their bones ‘like candle drippings’. Berlin, he recalled, was not ‘just one more beaten-up city: there the point had been reached where the victims were degraded beneath the reach of human sympathy’. When Malcolm Muggeridge arrived in the same city, he was astonished by what he found. By then the Russians had fought their way into the streets, house by house. The friezes and columns had been torn away from the Brandenburg Gate, from which the most warlike nation in Europe had once dispatched its armies in triumph. The trees along Unter Den Linden had been cut down for firewood or charcoal. The subway had been flooded on the order of Hitler himself, leaving people floating in black icy waters. The city presented a barren landscape permeated by the sour smell of rotting corpses and the occasional glimpse of the 50,000 or so orphans who’d been made deranged by both the bombing and the ferocity of the final ground attack. Did all this, Muggeridge asked, represent the triumph of good over evil? The world both writers saw was born from some of the moral compromises the Western allies had to make to win the war. That Hitler had to be defeated and Nazism crushed was the one moral certainty that sustained them. Churchill, Michael Burleigh reminds us in this magisterial work, gave a talk at the annual dinner of the Chamber of Commerce in Leeds in 1937 in which he told his audience that he had resolved never to visit the ‘Arctic or Antarctic regions in geography or politics’. ‘Give me the temperate zone. Give me London, or Paris, or New York. Let us keep to our faith and let us go somewhere and stay there where your breath is not frozen on your lips by the secret police.’ Within three years he had to reverse this view, expressing a pragmatic willingness to sup with the devil in order to defeat Nazism – a figure of speech that reflects his abhorrence for the Soviet system. (The grim reality was that if the USSR had not been Stalinist, it might never have survived the war at all.)

more from Christopher Coker at Literary Review here.

Marissa Calligeros in the Sydney Morning Herald:

It has taken the keen eye of a Queensland University of Technology physicist to spot a 99-year-old mistake in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The error may be slight, but it's an error nonetheless, Stephen Hughes said.

Dr Hughes claims he has discovered that the dictionary's definition of the word “siphon” has been incorrect since 1911.

The definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, and many other dictionaries, stated that atmospheric pressure was the force behind a siphon.

But in fact it is the force of gravity at work.

“It is gravity that moved the fluid in a siphon, with the water in the longer downward arm pulling the water up the shorter arm,” Dr Hughes said.

When Dr Hughes stumbled across the mistake he alerted the dictionary's revision team, which had just completed revising words beginning with the letter “R”.

“I thought, 'Oh good, just in time,' because S is next,” he said.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in Newsline:

The Saudi Arabia of our imagination is an ancient place, not much different from the way the second Caliph Omar might have found it on one of his nightly rounds. It’s a place where shopkeepers leave their shops open when they go to the mosque to pray. It’s a place of zero crime where a lone woman dressed in all her finery can go from one end of the kingdom to the other end, juggling gold coins, and nobody would dare give her a second glance. Here, justice is swift and transparent. The thieves get their hands chopped off in public, large crowds of believers gather to watch spectacular beheadings. Here, even wild camels are well behaved. The Saudis have followed Allah’s law in letter and spirit and hence, they have been blessed with unimaginable wealth. Is it not a miracle that desert bedouins are the world’s richest people? Is it not true that although hardly anything grows in those deserts but even if a dog goes hungry at night the ruler feels the responsibility?

There is enough evidence to suggest that it is all nonsense.

Saudi Arabia is a cruel place if you are not related to the ruling clan. If you are a foreigner, you might be living in the apartheid era in South Africa. If you are a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi, you can live there for three generations and still not get your basic rights as a citizen. If you are a girl student you can burn to death as the religious police stops firemen from entering your school. Saudi Arabia might pretend to conform to a 1,400-year-old tribal code, but they are also the world’s largest consumers of fast cars, luxury linen and flashy jewellery. They are the prized clients of the world’s richest casinos and upmarket brothels. Saudi Arabia keeps the American arms manufacturing industry in business, yet has no capacity to defend itself or any of the dozens of other Muslim countries that are not as blessed with American weaponry as Saudia. Here is a country which provided the most number of men for the 9/11 attacks yet nobody has ever suggested that the bombs that fell on Afghanistan and Iraq should have been directed towards Saudia. It has produced little except senile rulers with more wives than a Mormon could ever dream of. They have exported nothing but doomsday visionaries, who have been preaching and practicing the art of televised throat-slitting, mostly to and on their Muslim brothers.

More here.

“In this video, wooden balls roll up the slopes just as if they are pulled by a magnet. The behavior of the balls seems impossible, because it is against the gravity. The video is not a computer graphic, but a real scene. What is actually happening is that the orientations of the slopes are perceived oppositely, and hence the descending motion is misinterpreted as ascending motion. This illusion is remarkable in that it is generated by a three-dimensional solid object and physical motion, instead of a two-dimensional picture.”

Azra posted this article about the illusion a couple of days ago.

Mark Lilla in the New York Review of Books:

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

If we want to understand what today’s populism is about, we first need to understand what it isn’t about. It certainly is not about reversing the cultural revolution of the Sixties. Despite the rightward drift of the Republican Party over the past decade, the budding liberal consensus on social issues I noted in the Nineties has steadily grown—with the one, complicated exception of abortion.²

Consider the following:

• Since 2001 the proportion of those favoring more religious influence in society has dropped by a fifth, while those wanting less influence rose by half.³

• Today a majority of Americans find single parenthood morally acceptable, and nearly three quarters now tolerate divorce.⁴ Roughly a third of adults who have ever been married have also been divorced at least once, and that includes born-again Christians, whose rate is roughly the national average.⁵

• Though opposition to gay marriage has declined over the past quarter-century, a majority still opposes it. Yet more than half of all Americans find homosexuality morally acceptable, and a large majority favors equal employment opportunities for gays and lesbians, health and other benefits for their domestic partners, and letting them serve in the military. A smaller majority now approves of letting them legally adopt children as well.⁶

Though there’s been a slight conservative retrenchment since the 2008 election, it’s clear that the Sixties principle of private autonomy is rooted in the American mind.

More here. [Image shows Maximilien Robespierre.]

From American Scientist:

Stephen Jay Gould was an immensely charismatic, insightful and influential, but ultimately ambiguous, figure in American academic life. To Americans outside the life sciences proper, he was evolutionary biology. His wonderful essay collections articulated a vision of that discipline — its history, its importance and also its limits. One of the traits that made Gould so appealing to many in the humanities and social sciences is that he claimed neither too much nor too little for his discipline. In his books, evolutionary biology speaks to great issues concerning the universe and our place in it, but not so loudly as to drown out other voices. He had none of the apparently imperialist ambitions of that talented and equally passionate spokesman of biology Edward O. Wilson. It is no coincidence that the humanist intelligentsia have given a much friendlier reception to Gould than to Wilson. Gould's work is appealing to philosophers like me because it trades in big, but difficult and theoretically contested, ideas: the role of accident and the contingency of history; the relation between large-scale pattern and local process in the history of life; the role of social forces in the life of science.

Within the life sciences, Gould is regarded with more ambivalence. He gets credit (with others) for having made paleobiology again central to evolutionary biology. He did so by challenging theorists with patterns in the historical record that were at first appearance puzzling; if received views of evolutionary mechanism were correct, Gould argued, those patterns should not be there. The first and most famous such challenge grew from his work with Niles Eldredge on punctuated equilibrium, but there were more to come. Despite this important legacy, Gould's own place in the history of evolutionary biology is not secure. In late 2009, I attended an important celebration of Darwin's legacy at the University of Chicago, in which participants reviewed the current state of evolutionary biology and anticipated its future. Gould and his agenda were almost invisible.

More here.

From Orion Magazine:

[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.”

[2] NATURE WILL DECIDE what is sustainable; it always has and always will. The reflexive invocation of the term as cover for all manner of human acts and wants shows that sustainability has gained wide acceptance as a longed-for, if imperfectly understood, state of being.

[3] AN ACT, PROCESS, OR STATE of affairs can be said to be economically sustainable, ecologically sustainable, or socially sustainable. To these three some would add a fourth: culturally sustainable.

[4] NATURE IS MALLEABLE and has enormous resilience, a resilience that gives healthy ecosystems a dynamic equilibrium. But the resiliency of nature has limits and to transgress them is to act unsustainably. Thus, the most diffuse usage, “sensibly far-sighted,” is the usage that contains and properly reflects the strict ecological definition of the term: a thing is ecologically sustainable if it doesn’t destroy the environmental preconditions for its own existence.

More here.

Via Bill Benzon over at The Valve, Andrew Goldstone in Arcade:

What is tvtropes.org (henceforth TVT)? TVT is an amazing wiki devoted to the “tropes” of television, film, fiction, and, potentially, everything. The organizing idea of the site is the trope, very loosely defined as any convention or pattern to be found in and around these cultural objects; or, as the wiki's own Trope entry puts it, “It can be a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, a character type, a linguistic idiom… It's like porn; you know it when you see it.” The wry tone, by the way, is a regular feature of the site. As a wiki, the site can be edited by any interested party wanting to add to the huge number of encyclopedia-like entries devoted to tropes, though one feels that a core group of “tropers” superintend the process. A typical trope is something like A Hero Is Born, for the common method of beginning a story with the hero's birth; on the page devoted to the trope, we find a whimsical definition and an annotated list of examples.

One of the major sources of the site's appeal comes from these examples: they are wildly heterogenous, a record of the interests of whichever “troper” happened to add to the page for a particular trope. A Hero Is Born lists, among its examples, Bambi, the protagonist of Fallout 3, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro, and Tristram Shandy (with the comment “begins with the hero's conception.”) More typical of the site would be the examples in Setting Update, which includes four different anime updatings of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (including one “as a Lolicon parody”), a list of film versions of Shakespeare plays, and such literary entries as: “Reginald Hill's Pictures of Perfection is Pride and Prejudice Oop North IN THE 1990s! AS A GAY ROMANCE!”

I include the links in that last to show another essential feature of TVT: many TV programs, films and books have their own master pages, with whimsical summaries and lists of every trope on the site of which they furnish an example (for Pride and Prejudice, the wiki notes such tropes as Affably Evil [Wickham], Beta Couple [Jane and Mr. Bingley], Poor Communication Kills, and so on). This means it is possible to discover some book, film, or TV program listed among the examples for a trope, follow the link to the book, film, or TV program page, discover another trope, look at its list of examples, and follow further links, following the winds of convention and invention across a sea of culture. This is a completely mesmerizing process–or so, I hope, some readers of this post will discover!

(Oop North, by the way, refers to stereotyped ideas of the North of England. A certain number of British and Anglophile participants in the site delight in making their own cultural conventions intelligible to the presumably mostly American audience of the website. A pretty exhibition of the global potential in any wiki of this kind.)

The Moral of the Story

If you are still with me, you must be wondering why I have spent so long in an Arcade blog post describing a website devoted to a strange sort of obsessive television fandom. I want to propose that TV Tropes actually has a lot to tell us about modes of work in the humanities in the present moment–and the news is, unusually for me, more good than bad.

Nik Steinberg and Daniel Wilkinson in the NYRB:

For years, many believed that the last thing keeping the region’s democratic tide from sweeping across Cuba was the unique force of Fidel Castro’s character—the extraordinary combination of charisma and cunning with which he inspired and corralled his supporters, provoked and outmaneuvered his enemies, and projected himself onto the big screen of world politics. Under his leadership, Cuba had made impressive gains in health care, education, and the eradication of extreme poverty. But the promise of the Cuban Revolution had been undercut by years of chronic deprivation, exacerbated by the US embargo, and brought to the brink of collapse by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which had propped up the island’s economy for decades. Democracy would come to Cuba—the thinking went—as soon as Fidel Castro was no longer standing in its way.

Then in June 2006, his health failing, Castro was forced to step down formally after nearly five decades in power. And nothing happened. No popular uprising in the streets, no Party shake-up, no coup. Instead, his younger brother, Raúl, took up power and, though lacking Fidel’s charisma, was able to keep the country running smoothly. Within months, it seemed clear that Cuba’s single-party system could continue without Fidel at the helm.

Some still held out hope that Raúl Castro would begin a process of political reform, a Cuban perestroika. Those looking for signs of an opening pointed to several of Raúl’s early actions, including state-sponsored public forums ostensibly aimed at encouraging criticism of government policies and the signing of the two major international human rights treaties.

But was Raúl Castro allowing genuine criticism of his government? Was the repressive machinery being eased or even dismantled? A year ago Human Rights Watch set out to answer these questions. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. The Cuban government welcomes tourists to the island, but has for years denied access to international rights monitors. Foreign journalists are followed around by undercover agents: their e-mails are monitored and their phones tapped. Those who publish in-depth stories on controversial issues face expulsion.

Dani Rodrik in Project Syndicate:

The $140 billion support package that the Greek government has finally received from its European Union partners and the International Monetary Fund gives it the breathing space needed to undertake the difficult job of putting its finances in order. The package may or may not prevent Spain and Portugal from becoming undone in a similar fashion, or indeed even head off an eventual Greek default. Whatever the outcome, it is clear that the Greek debacle has given the EU a black eye.

Deep down, the crisis is yet another manifestation of what I call “the political trilemma of the world economy”: economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable. We can have at most two at one time. Democracy is compatible with national sovereignty only if we restrict globalization. If we push for globalization while retaining the nation-state, we must jettison democracy. And if we want democracy along with globalization, we must shove the nation-state aside and strive for greater international governance.

The history of the world economy shows the trilemma at work. The first era of globalization, which lasted until 1914, was a success as long as economic and monetary policies remained insulated from domestic political pressures. These policies could then be entirely subjugated to the demands of the gold standard and free capital mobility. But once the political franchise was enlarged, the working class got organized, and mass politics became the norm, domestic economic objectives began to compete with (and overwhelm) external rules and constraints.

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Two spiders are walking along a track – a seemingly ordinary scene, but these are no ordinary spiders. They are molecular robots and they, like the tracks they stride over, are fashioned from DNA. One of them has four legs and marches over its DNA landscape, turning and stopping with no controls from its human creators. The other has four legs and three arms – it walks along a miniature assembly line, picking up three pieces of cargo from loading machines (also made of DNA) and attaching them to itself. All of this is happening at the nanometre scale, far beyond what the naked eye can discern. Welcome to the exciting future of nanotechnology.

The two robots are the stars of two new papers that describe the latest advances in making independent, programmable nano-scale robots out of individual molecules. Such creations have featured in science-fiction stories for decades, from Michael Crichton’s Prey to Red Dwarf, but in reality, there are many barriers to creating such machines. For a start, big robots can be loaded with masses of software that guides their actions – no such luck at the nano-level.

The two new studies have solved this problem by programming the robots’ actions into their environment rather than their bodies. Standing on the shoulders of giants, both studies fuse two of the most interesting advances in nanotechnology: the design of DNA machines, fashioned from life’s essential double helix and possessing the ability to walk about; and the invention of DNA origami, where sets of specially constructed DNA molecules can be fused together into beautiful sheets and sculptures. Combine the two and you get a robot walker and a track for it to walk upon.

Frank Kermode in the LRB:

Tennyson was not a poet for whom T.S. Eliot professed much love, though he was judicious as well as cool in his appraisals: ‘He has three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety and complete competence.’ (He means ‘they must be like Dante.’) And ‘he had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton’ – an opinion that loses warmth when one recalls what Eliot said elsewhere about Milton. (Having a fine ear is not enough.) When Eliot attends to Tennysonian detail, for instance in Maud, he finds much to dislike, and pronounces ‘the ravings of the lover on the edge of insanity’ and the ‘bellicose bellowings’ to be ‘false’: they fail ‘to make one’s flesh creep with sincerity’. But In Memoriam is a different matter; there alone does Eliot find that Tennyson achieves ‘full expression’. He issues, quite insistently, his customary warning: the poem must be ‘comprehended as a whole’. Nevertheless it seems permissible to remember this part on its own:

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more –
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

‘This,’ Eliot says, ‘is great poetry, economical of words, a universal emotion related to a particular place; and it gives me the shudder that I fail to get from anything in Maud.’ ‘Shudder’ is a bit surprising coming from the stately Eliot, though the experience to which he refers may in some forms be common enough. He certainly experienced it, or something that puts him or us in mind of it. If the word is used as equivalent to ‘frisson’ (and lexicographers defining frisson seem unable to avoid ‘shudder’), we can propose a debt to the French, likely in these years when English poets were influenced, as Eliot was, by Baudelaire and others. Indeed Eliot, rejecting the 1890s reading of Baudelaire, had made himself the major exponent of that author as a fierce moralist as well as the poet of ‘l’immonde cité’, and Baudelaire’s book has its share of horrors, shudders and shadows. Huysmans, a disciple of Baudelaire, was admired by Eliot, and it might be said that his A Rebours would have to be shortlisted in any shuddering competition, especially as frémir lends support to frissonner. As an admirer of Huysmans, Oscar Wilde had recourse to the ‘shudder’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray. A high proportion of these instances occur in commonplace expressions such as ‘I shudder at the thought’ or ‘a shudder passed through’ whoever it was, examples which tend only to show that whatever its original force the shudder was susceptible to vulgarisation; but the word remained capable of describing the horror, or even the beauty, of a body’s response to violent stimulus.

The basement club was cramped, and the bandstand was so small that, by the drummer’s measure, it could hardly hold a fight. The clientele included mobsters, musicians, and star performers from the nearby Broadway shows, slipping in among the crowd from the time the band appeared, at about ten o’clock, straight on “until.” The banjoist who provided the schedule could elaborate no further about how long the night went on: “Until you quit. Until period.” After 3 A.M., you couldn’t get a seat. In the fall of 1926, the craze for Negro music was already sending savvy white New Yorkers up to Harlem, but the Kentucky Club, on West Forty-ninth Street, had the hottest band in town. Trumpets, trombone, saxes, clarinet, tuba, banjo, and drums—nine or so players, huddled on the stand beneath the pipes that ran along the ceiling, plus the handsome young piano player who led the group while dancers surged around him on the floor. But the band did more than keep the temperature high and the dancers moving; its arrangements were so startling that even a familiar number like “St. Louis Blues” sounded new. Variety capped a gushing review of the “colored combo” by noting that the club’s patrons—transfixed “jazz boys” and civilians alike—spent a remarkable amount of time just sitting around and listening. Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians had been performing in New York, under one name or another, for about three years, but their range and ambition were just beginning to show.

more from Claudia Roth Pierpont at The New Yorker here.

After spending much time in such rugged places as Afghanistan and the murderous US–Mexican borderlands, Vollmann has picked his destination well. For Japan is the right place to observe artificial beauty, from the plastic cherry blossoms that adorn city streets in spring to the mincing steps of the (male) actor of female roles (onnagata) in the Kabuki theater. Few cultures have developed the refinements of erotic performance more than the Japanese. Japan has the reputation of a country soaked in exquisite beauty (once you know how to pick your way around the neon and concrete jungles) and kinky sexual adventure. These things are there, to be sure, but beauty and grace are rarely approached directly; they are represented rather than revealed, and thus elusive. And that is what interests Vollmann: the dream, the way our desires act on the imagination, whether they be that of an old drunk trying to find Gloria in the eyes of every whore he meets or the Californian author stalking Noh stages and the straw-matted rooms of geisha establishments. Some believe, in defense of the great art of men playing women in Noh, Kabuki, or in pre-Communist days the Chinese opera, that men can represent the allure of female beauty better than women can. For the idea is not to mimic reality but, as in a Chinese painting, to express an idea of reality, an abstraction almost. Men can represent the idea of women better, because they can take a distance from the real thing and reinvent it as art.

more from Ian Buruma at the NYRB here.

February 1915 found T. S. Eliot in Oxford and a quandary: “The great need is to know one’s own mind, and I don’t know that: whether I want to get married, and have a family, and live in America all my life, and compromise and conceal my opinions and forfeit my independence for the sake of my children’s future”. On June 26 of that year, he married Vivien Haigh-Wood in Hampstead; he never lived in America again and had no children. He went in four months from the “Do I dare?” of Prufrock, dawdling between plaintiveness and amusement on the edge of risk, straight over that edge into irreparability such as The Waste Land voices in lines pierced by thought of “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract”. He wrote to his brother a week after the event: “You will have heard by this time of the surprising change in my plans . . . . The only really surprising thing is that I should have had the force to attempt it”. The marriage was actually a change of planner as well as of plan. Eliot turned out a Gauguin in reverse: the painter gave up family and stockbroking in pursuit of colour; the poet grew beyond foreseeing through immersion in miseries at home. Each staked a lot on what would become of him, though neither could know at the time of daring whether, looking back, he would be seen to have made the right choice.

more from Eric Griffiths at the TLS here.

From PhysOrg:

From MSNBC:

The definition of bioluminescence “is easier than the pronunciation and spelling of the word: It is just visible light made by living animals,” says Edith Widder, president of the Ocean Research and Conservation Association in Fort Pierce, Fla.

The word may be easy to define, but the chemical process is still poorly understood. Bioluminescence has apparently evolved independently at least 40 times in species belonging to more than 700 genera, or classifications of organisms. Widder notes in the journal Science that about 80 percent of those genera are found in the open ocean.

Examples of bioluminescent organisms include yellow-glowing Tompteris worms (upper left). Also pictured (clockwise) are the squid Abralia veranyi; northern krill, known by the scientific name Meganyctiphanes norvegica; the scaleless black dragon fish (Melanstomias bartonbeani); and deep-sea jellyfish (Atolla wyvillei).

More here.

Over at the WSJOnline, David Wessel looks at Raghuram Rajan's new book Fault Lines (excerpts available here at google books):

[T]his [financial crisis] was a Greek tragedy in which traders and bankers, congressmen and subprime borrowers all played their parts until the drama reached the inevitably painful end. (Mr. Rajan plays Cassandra, of course.) But just when you're about to cast him as a University of Chicago free-market stereotype, he surprises by identifying the widening gap between rich and poor as a big cause of the calamity.

The first Rajan fault line lies in the U.S. As incomes at the top soared, politicians responded to middle-class angst about stagnant wages and insecurity over jobs and health insurance. Since they couldn't easily raise incomes—Mr. Rajan is in the camp that sees better education as the only cure and that takes time—politicians of both parties gave constituents more to spend by fostering an explosion of credit, especially for housing.

This has happened before: Farmers' grievances led to a U.S. government-backed expansion of bank credit in the 1920s; India's state-owned banks pump credit into poor constituencies in election years. But one thing was different: “When easy money pushed by a deep pocketed government comes into contact with the profit motive of a sophisticated, amoral financial sector, a deep fault line develops,” Mr. Rajan writes. House prices shot up, banks borrowed cheaply and heavily to build leveraged mountains of ever more risky mortgage-linked securities.

The second fault line lies in the relentless exporting of many countries. Germany and Japan grew rich by exporting. They built agile export sectors that compete with the world's best, but shielded or strangled domestic industries such as banking and retailing. These industries are uncompetitive and inefficient, and charge high prices that discourage consumer spending.

China and others got to a similar place by a different route. Financial crises in the 1990s showed them the dangers of relying on money flowing from rich countries through local banks to finance factories, office towers and other investment. So they switched strategies, borrowed less and turned to exporting more to fuel growth. This led them to hold down exchange rates (that makes exports more attractive to others). So doing meant building huge rainy day funds of U.S. dollars.

The result: A lot of money abroad looking for a place to go met a lot of demand for borrowing in U.S. A lot of foolish loans were made.

A third Rajan fault line spread the crisis. The U.S. approach to recession-fighting—unemployment insurance and the like—and its social safety net are geared for fast, quick recoveries of the past, not for jobless recoveries now the norm. That puts pressure on Washington to do something: tax cuts, spending increases and very low interest rates.

These things are by nature impossible to see, but the Florida Atlantic University parking lots in Boca Raton are built on a lost civilization. In 1903, 29-year-old Japanese pioneer and recent NYU graduate Jo Sakai had a notion. He would gather together a small band of enthusiasts, investors, and hangers-on, he told the Jacksonville Board of Trade. Together, they would grow pineapples and rearrange a little piece of America based on utopian ideals and Japanese know-how. “A Jap here at Rickard’s looking for a tract of land for a colony,” noted Frank Chesebro, Boca banana pioneer, in his diary. By 1905 the Yamato Colony set sail. The educated colonists were few at first, and they didn’t actually know how to farm, but they worked hard for their new tropical micro-paradise. Clusters of shacks sprouted up on the half-flooded, mosquito-infested plantation. “Industrious Japs Will Soon Incorporate” read the headline in the Tropical Sun. The all-Jap colony “is intensely patriotic and is working in every way to advance the general welfare of the state.” Children were born, children were raised. A railroad station and post office were built.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set here.

Over at Princeton University Press, the Introduction from Ian Buruma's Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents:

The fact that religion is back is more newsworthy in Europe than in the United States, where religion was never supposed to have been away. But even in the United States, for about half a century between the 1920s and the 1970s, organized religion had not been a major politi­ cal force. It was always there, especially outside the urban areas, as a social phenomenon. And it impinged on politics. John F. Kennedy, not an especially pious man, had to reassure the voters that he would never take orders from the Vatican. It would have been impossible for a candidate who openly professed disbelief to become president of the United States, and it still is. But Jimmy Carter’s compulsion to spread the good news of his born­again faith was something of an anomaly. He was a political liberal, however, who never allowed religious authority to interfere with his politics. Since then, the influence of evangelical Christianity in the political arena has grown, mainly but not exclusively as a right­wing, socially conservative force.

Especially during the eight years of George W. Bush’s administration, it was a commonplace in Europe to contrast the secular nature of the Old World to the religiosity of the United States. When the ideological positions that had hitched Western Europe and the United States together during the cold war became redundant after 1989, people began to sense a growing rift between the two continents as though a schism had occurred in Western civilization. Forgetting just how recently the authority of established churches had been diminished even in the most liberal European countries, Europeans talked as though secularism had always distinguished them from the parochial, conservative, God­fearing Americans. It was an understandable perception, because even as the church lost most of its clout in Europe, the faithful gained more political power in the United States, at least in the Republican Party. It is by no means a sure thing, however, that Christianity will not stage a comeback in Europe or retain its influence on politics in the United States.