Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Brainism: Understanding Our Recent Obsession With Stress and the Mind

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One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble With Stress as an Idea By Dana Becker (Oxford University Press) Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind By Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached (Princeton University Press) “I never used to discuss neuroscience on the bus,” wrote the psychologist Vaughan Bell recently in The Guardian, “but it’s happened twice in the last month.” People these days love to talk about brains. In everyday conversation and mainstream media reports, the organ and its processes are casually invoked (“my synapses are firing”) where ... Read More

Guide to a Sizzling Planet

The Casino Pier Star Jet roller coaster submerged in the sea on January 13, 2013 in Seaside Heights, NJ. (PHOTO: GLYNNIS JONES/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change By Andrew T. Guzman (Oxford University Press, 249 pages) A Newer World: Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis By William F. Hewitt (University of New Hampshire Press, 304 pages) I'M WRITING THIS a few blocks from Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, where business owners are still cleaning up after the catastrophic floods of Hurricane Sandy in October. Walking down Van Brunt Street a few weekends ago, I stepped over mildewed Sheetrock and around piles of corroded electrical equipment: ... Read More

Red Science, Blue Science

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The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality By Chris Mooney; (Wiley) Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fantasies and the Rise of the Scientific Left By Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell; (PublicAffairs) TIMES OF INTENSE IDEOLOGICAL POLARIZATION are always dreary for reasonable people. Consider the Marquis de Condorcet, a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and political philosopher who was forced into hiding during the French Revolution after running afoul of the radical followers of Robespierre. During his months as a fugitive, Condorcet penned a ... Read More

False Clarity, Authentic Confusion

Crowds in Shanghai, China (PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy By Edward N. Luttwak, Harvard University Press. Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land Editors: Angilee Shah and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California Press. IN THE THREE DECADES since China opened its doors to the world, there is little indication that the West has grown any closer to understanding the Chinese. This is no surprise. Understanding China has been an elusive goal of the West—with, arguably, little progress—since the Jesuit missions of the 16th century. Two recent books provide ... Read More

Book Review: Helping, or Harming, in Haiti?

Killing with Kindness by Mark Schuller. Rutgers University Press, $26.95 (paperback).

Is humanitarian aid good for those who receive it? This deceptively simple question with a not-so-straightforward answer has been the subject of lively debate in recent years, as well as the subject of books by Timothy Schwartz, Dambisa Moyo and Linda Polman, among others. The answer is undoubtedly yes in an acute disaster—the sort of situation which temporarily overwhelms the ability of otherwise well-functioning local governments to marshal the necessary resources to mitigate its impact. The damage Hurricane Katrina inflicted on the city of New Orleans and rest of the Eastern Gulf ... Read More

Book Reviews: How the Wealth Gap Damages Democracy

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Inequality and Instability. By James K. Galbraith, Oxford University Press. Affluence & Influence. By Martin Gilens, Princeton University Press. Reviewed by James Ledbetter, the op-ed editor of Reuters and the author, most recently, of Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the D Military-Industrial Complex   What do we mean by “inequality,” and why exactly is it bad for American democracy? Are we discussing inequality of wages within a given firm or industry? Or inequality in household income—i.e., the difference between the poor and the middle class, or ... Read More

Nagasaki Wasn’t Supposed to Have Been the Target 67 Years Ago Today

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From "The Men Who Dropped the Second Bomb," Australian journalist Craig Collie's modern account of the US atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki, 67 years ago today. The complete account appeared in London's Telegraph, and can be read here. Collie is the author of  Nagasaki, a 2011 reconstruction of the decision to drop "the forgotten bomb."  A fascinating 2011 interview with Collie by Australia's ABC radio is here. The crew of the B-29 Bockscar was not supposed to have targeted Nagasaki, a port city on Japan's eastern coast. Cloud cover forced the mission's commander to re-route the attack ... Read More

The Dictator’s Learning Curve: David and Goliath Tales for Our Times

Bust of dictator Stalin

How have struggles between authoritarian governments and their challengers changed since the Cold War? And why do moves toward democratization proceed smoothly in some settings but stall out or get reversed in others? These are the kinds of questions that veteran journalist William J. Dobson, an editor at Slate, sets out to answer in The Dictator’s Learning Curve, his intelligent and informative first book. They are certainly timely ones. Events such as Arab Spring led TIME Magazine to dub 2011 the “Year of the Protester”; headlines from a few months ago told of a loosening of ... Read More

Book Review: Practical Ways to Become More Creative

Innovation Generation: How to produce creative and useful scientific ideas" By Roberta Ness (New York: Oxford University Press) $29.95

Reviewed by Paul Silvia, associate professor of psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Some of science’s best ideas hide in plain sight: they seem obvious, even fatuous, but they have surprising implications. In the 1950s, J. P. Guilford, a founder of modern creativity research, wondered what would happen if he told some people to “be creative” while they were working on creativity tasks. He gathered a sample of adults and had them come up with unusual uses for common objects and write titles for short stories; half were told to try to come up with creative ideas. Not ... Read More

College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be

College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be

Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is often loosely cited to support even looser claims that America is declining. But Gibbon’s observation that in ancient Rome “a cloud of critics, compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning” does resonate with something that's gone wrong in American liberal-arts education. In his telling, Rome’s loss of its republican virtues had left its later writers and orators in “very unequal competition with those bold ancients” who had expressed “their genuine feelings in their native tongue” and, "living under a ... Read More