Rise of the Coyote: The New Top Dog by Sharon Levy.
Near the dawn of time, the story goes, Coyote saved the creatures of Earth. According to the mythology of Idaho’s Nez Perce people, the monster Kamiah had stalked into the region and was gobbling up the animals one by one. The crafty Coyote evaded Kamiah but didn’t want to lose his friends, so he let himself be swallowed. From inside the beast, Coyote severed Kamiah’s heart and freed his fellow animals. Then he chopped up Kamiah and threw the pieces to the winds, where they gave birth to the peoples of the planet.
European colonists took a very different view of the coyote (Canis latrans) and other predators native to North America. The settlers hunted wolves to extinction across most of the southerly 48 states. They devastated cougar and bobcat populations and attacked coyotes. But unlike the other predators, coyotes have thrived in the past 150 years. Once restricted to the western plains, they now occupy most of the continent and have invaded farms and cities, where they have expanded their diet to include squirrels, household pets and discarded fast food.
Researchers have long known the coyote as a master of adaptation, but studies over the past few years are now revealing how these unimposing relatives of wolves and dogs have managed to succeed where many other creatures have suffered. Coyotes have flourished in part by exploiting the changes that people have made to the environment, and their opportunism goes back thousands of years. In the past two centuries, coyotes have taken over part of the wolf’s former ecological niche by preying on deer and even on an endangered group of caribou. Genetic studies reveal that the coyotes of northeastern America — which are bigger than their cousins elsewhere — carry wolf genes that their ancestors picked up through interbreeding. This lupine inheritance has given northeastern coyotes the ability to bring down adult deer — a feat seldom attempted by the smaller coyotes of the west.
More at Nature.
Europe’s New Normal by R. Daniel Kelemen.
The eurozone’s troubles no longer qualify as a crisis, an unstable situation that could either quickly improve or take a dramatic turn for the worse. They are, instead, a new normal — a painful situation, to be sure, but one that will last for years to come. Citizens, investors, and policymakers should let go of the idea that there is some magic bullet that could quickly kill off Europe’s ailments. By the same token, despite the real possibility of Greek exit, the eurozone is not on the brink of collapse. The European Union and its common currency will hold together, but the road to recovery will be long.
It has been nearly two and a half years since the incoming socialist government in Greece revealed the extent to which its predecessor had accumulated debt, precipitating an economic storm that has left slashed budgets, collapsed governments, and record unemployment in its wake. With each dramatic turn, observers have anticipated the story’s denouement. But again and again, a definitive resolution — either a policy fix or a total collapse — has failed to emerge.
The truth is that there are no quick escapes from the eurozone’s predicament. Divorce is no solution. Although some economists suggest that struggling countries on the periphery could leave the euro and return to a national currency in order to regain competitiveness and restore growth, no country would willingly leave the eurozone; doing so would amount to economic suicide. Its financial system would collapse, and ensuing bank runs and riots would make today’s social unrest seem quaint by comparison. What is more, even after a partial default, the country’s government and financial firms would still be burdened by debt denominated largely in euros. As the value of the new national currency plummeted, the debt would become unbearable, and the government, now outside the club, would not be able to turn to the eurozone for help.
More at FA.
Israel’s Image Revisited by Aaron David Miller.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal this week on the occasion of Israeli Independence Day, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren penned a powerful op-ed on the erosion of Israel’s image.
His conclusion: Israel’s image has deteriorated in large part because of a “systematic delegitimization of the Jewish state.”
“Having failed to destroy Israel by conventional arms and terrorism,” he writes, “Israel’s enemies alit on a subtler and more sinister tactic that hampers Israel’s ability to defend itself, even to justify its existence.”
First, some full disclosure. I like and respect Michael Oren. He’s a remarkably talented historian, astute analyst, and able diplomat.
I also have no doubt that there are efforts to delegitimize Israel, that anti-Semitism pervades some of the anti-Israel rhetoric, that Israel is one of the few countries in the world that’s judged by impossibly high standards, and that the perception and reality of its power causes many to ignore the realities of its vulnerability.
But I just don’t buy the argument that Israel’s image has eroded principally because of a dedicated campaign to delegitimize it.
Three other factors drive Israel’s very bad PR: the realities of nation-building, the image of the asymmetry of power, and Israel’s own actions, which, like those of so many other countries, value short-term tactics over long-term strategy.
More at FP.
TNR reviews The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers—How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death by Dick Teresi.
Hatfields and McCoys: An American Vendetta by Kim Gilmore.
Hatfields and McCoys—their surnames evoke visions of gun-toting vigilantes hell-bent on defending their kinfolk, igniting bitter grudges that would span generations. Yet many people familiar with these names may know little about the faded history of these two families and the legends they inspired. Who were the Hatfields and McCoys, and what was the source of their bitter clash?
Read more.
Liberal Intolerance and Naomi Riley’s Firing by Cathy Young.
There is much handwringing today, both from liberals and disaffected conservatives, about the deplorable intellectual climate on the right: blinkered ideology, disdain for facts, demonization of opponents. Sure enough, such behavior is depressingly common. But does the left behave differently when its sacred cows are being gored?
Read more.
The Failure of Arab Liberals by Sohrab Ahmari.
Lamenting the illiberal fruit of the Arab Spring has become a favorite pastime of the Western commentariat. A year and a half after the movement’s outbreak, pundits from across the political spectrum compete daily for valuable editorial real estate to announce, in so many words, “We told you so.” For the left, Islamist ascendance across post-revolutionary North Africa provides ample evidence of the limits of American influence and the need for a foreign policy even more humble than that espoused by the Obama administration. On the realist right, the rhetoric differs, but the underlying message—that America must finally abandon global democratization as a core element of its national strategy—is very much the same.
More.
(There may be a few pundits on the left who might be able to say “I told you so,” but the vast majority will be from the right. Most left-wing pundits supported the Arab spring.)
The WSJ reviews Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian by Bernard Lewis.
Much to Answer For by Glenn C. Loury.
The esteemed political scientist and criminologist James Q. Wilson died in March. He wrote many important works, including a leading textbook on American government currently in its twelfth edition. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003.
His most significant legacy, however, lies in the impact of his scholarship and journalism on the contemporary structures of social control in the United States. His 1975 book Thinking About Crime provides academic justification for a massive increase in imprisonment in the United States that began in the late 1970s and has yet fully to run its course. (The United States incarcerates at five times the rate of Britain, the leading jailer in Europe.) It is therefore entirely fitting—indeed, imperative—that there be extensive, critical public discussion about the intellectual impact of this towering figure of the study of American government.
More.
Beware the Creeping Cracks of Bias by Daniel Sarewitz.
Alarming cracks are starting to penetrate deep into the scientific edifice. They threaten the status of science and its value to society. And they cannot be blamed on the usual suspects — inadequate funding, misconduct, political interference, an illiterate public. Their cause is bias, and the threat they pose goes to the heart of research.
More at Nature.
Obama, Romney, and Equality by James Ceaser.
If the test of a clever orator is the ability to sell two incompatible positions at the same time, President Obama must already rank as one of the most adept rhetoricians in American history. The President steadfastly disavows any intent to foment division between economic classes, even as he works at every step to denounce the wealthy. At Osawatomie, Kansas last December, in what was billed as an historic speech on his governing philosophy, Obama insisted “this isn’t about class warfare,” and then went on immediately to attack “the breathtaking greed of a few” and “mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes.”
These lines were a throwback to the class rhetoric not only of Theodore Roosevelt, whose speech President Obama was channeling, but also of cousin Franklin, who fulminated in his First Inaugural against “the unscrupulous money changers [who] stand indicted in the court of public opinion.” These attacks are ostensibly not on the rich themselves, but on the undeserving rich. These poor souls were formerly characterized mostly by their practices and disposition (unscrupulousness and greed) and their occupation (finance). President Obama has added a political dimension: refusing to buckle to his idea of paying a “fair share.” The good or deserving rich, by contrast, are those like Warren Buffet, George Clooney, and Jon Corzine, who abhor the Bush tax cuts.
In the selection of Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee President Obama has found a target too rich to pass up.
Read the rest here.
Freud’s Not Dead; He’s Just Really Hard to Find by Susan Krauss Whitbourne.
According to a claim made several years ago in the New York Times, Freud’s theory is still taught in universities, but not in psychology classes. When asked to explain why, the article puts forward the assertion (backed by two prominent psychologists) that psychoanalysis doesn’t have a solid evidence-based grounding.
I recently heard a talk in which the speaker, a physicist, referred to the Times article as “proof” that there’s not a shred of validity to the Freudian perspective. It seems like a good time to set the record straight. Using the criteria established for evidence-based treatment, traditional psychoanalysis alone does not in fact pass muster as a method of therapy for the large majority of psychological disorders. However, to dismiss Freud’s contributions as irrelevant to psychology, as this article (and the speaker) implies, is an oversimplification.
More at PT.
Money Unlimited by Jeffrey Toobin.
When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law prohibited corporations from running television commercials for or against Presidential candidates for thirty days before primaries. During that period, Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had wanted to run a documentary, as a cable video on demand, called “Hillary: The Movie,” which was critical of Hillary Clinton. The F.E.C. had prohibited the broadcast under McCain-Feingold, and Citizens United had challenged the decision. There did not seem to be a lot riding on the outcome. After all, how many nonprofits wanted to run documentaries about Presidential candidates, using relatively obscure technologies, just before elections?
Read the rest.
The Writer in the Family by Roger Rosenblatt.
So there I stood at the front of my granddaughter Jessica’s fourth-grade classroom, still as a glazed dog, while Jessie introduced me to her classmates, to whom I was about to speak. “This is my grandfather, Boppo,” she said, invoking my grandpaternal nickname. “He lives in the basement and does nothing.”
More at the NYT.
Will Wilkinson reviews America the Philosophical by Carlin Romano.
The jacket copy of Carlin Romano’s “America the Philosophical” trumpets the astonishing news that “America today towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace for truth and debate that far surpasses ancient Greece …” Wow! I didn’t know. Six hundred prolix pages later, after having learned that Hugh Hefner, Bill Moyers and Barack Obama all redound to America’s world-historical philosophical splendor, I didn’t care.
Here’s Romano’s argument in outline: We must dispense with the idea that philosophy is an esoteric technical discipline devoted to the discovery of once-and-for-all “Truth.” There is no truth. There is, instead, lots of talk. A motley of competing claims vies for our allegiance. Equipped with an array of rhetorical stratagems, none inherently dispositive, we strive ceaselessly to come to some provisional agreement that helps make sense of our world. Philosophy is best understood as “reasonably careful thinking, sensitive to reality,” a practical activity we undertake together as we struggle to master the predicaments of common life. Once we understand philosophy thus — expansively, pragmatically — we can see that Americans of all walks of life produce tons of it, and usually far from the groves of academe. Indeed, America is the philosophicalest; just look at Barack Obama, our “philosopher in chief”! (Really.)
A Censored Race War? by Thomas Sowell.
When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.
More here.
Kidding Yourself Is No Laughing Matter by Tom Jacobs.
There’s one at every comedy club: the guy sitting there stone-faced, while everyone around him is laughing. There are many possible explanations: He was dragged there by his girlfriend, doesn’t like the stand-up’s style, or is simply having a bad day.
But if his humorlessness is chronic, the underlying issue may be more basic: He just isn’t honest with himself. According to newly published research, self-deception inhibits laughter.
“Humor deals with the absurdities of life,” Rutgers University anthropologists Robert Lynch and Robert Trivers write in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. “The less you are in tune with reality, the less likely you are to see the absurdities.”
Read more.
The Spirit of Geert Wilders by Mark Steyn.
When I was asked to write a foreword to Geert Wilders’ new book, my first reaction, to be honest, was to pass. Mr. Wilders lives under 24/7 armed guard because significant numbers of motivated people wish to kill him, and it seemed to me, as someone who’s attracted more than enough homicidal attention over the years, that sharing space in these pages was likely to lead to an uptick in my own death threats. Who needs it? Why not just plead too crowded a schedule and suggest the author try elsewhere? I would imagine Geert Wilders gets quite a lot of this.
More at NRO.
HHS Sends $5.9 Million to Program Run by Obama Buddy by Keith Koffler.
The Department of Health and Human Services last week announced it had awarded a $5.9 million grant to a University of Chicago Medical Center program tied to Michelle Obama and run by Eric Whitaker, one of President Obama’s closest friends.
The Urban Health Initiative, which received the award, was originally based on a smaller program launched during the last decade by Michelle Obama, who was an executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center before she departed to become first lady. The UHI is headed up by Obama basketball and golf buddy Whitaker, who has known the president since Obama’s days in law school and who also vacations with the first family.
More.