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Obama demonstrates that [glamor's] magic still exists. What a glamorous candidate he was-less a person than a persona, an idealized, self-contained figure onto whom audiences projected their own dreams, a Garbo-like "impassive receptacle of passionate hopes and impossible expectations," in the words of Time's Joe Klein.

The institutional conditions of practical progress

The complete text of "Plasticity into Power: Comparative Historical Studies in the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success," which forms part of the Politics series. The book was originally published in 1988 and is to be republished by Verso in the near future. It explores, in comparative historical detail, an idea that plays a major role in my social-theoretical writings: the idea of the practical as well as the moral advantages of institutional arrangements and discursive practices that facilitate their own revision.

"Plasticity into Power" was published by Verso in a new paperback edition in 2004 together with "False Necessity" and "Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task." To order this book go to the "my books" section of this website.

It is very disturbing to find telegrams signed off by Hillary Clinton which seem to suggest that regular American diplomats are being asked to do stuff you would normally expect of low-level spooks – such as grubbing around for top UN officials' credit card and biometric details.

彼得森国际经济研究所的Arvind Subramanian的新书，该书认为中国经济实力将很快让美国黯然失色——比人们预期的要快。

Masses of information from the media constantly bombard us. Yet paradoxically often what is most significant goes unreported. Take for instance Tony Blair's recent visit to Africa. Suddenly countries such as Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Ghana come under the spotlight. But one country which forever remains off the UK/US media map is Chad, lying just to the south of Libya and "over three times the size of California", according to the CIA's official website.  Formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, it gained independence in 1960 and since then has been gripped by civil war. In a rare case of coverage, on May 21 1992, the Guardian carried four short paragraphs: 40,000 people were estimated to have died in detention or been executed during the tyranny of Chadian president Hissene Habre (1982-1990). A report of the justice ministry committee concluded that Habre had committed genocide against the Chadian people.  Unreported in Britain, two years ago, in a case inspired by the one against General Pinochet of Chile, several human rights organisations, led by Human Rights Watch, filed a suit against Habre in Senegal (his refuge since 1990) arguing that he could be tried anywhere for crimes against humanity and that former heads of state were not immune.  However, on 20 March 2001, the Senegal Court of Cassation threw out the case. Human rights groups are now aiming to secure an arrest warrant and extradition request from Belgium (where one of the victims of Habre's torture now lives) and put him on trial there.  So behind the wall of silence, what precisely has been going on in Chad? In fact, the US and UK have been conducting over the last three decades a massive, secret war against Libya - often using Chad as its base. UK involvement in a 1996 plot to assassinate the Libya leader, President Col Mu'ammar Gadafi, as currently alleged by the maverick M15 officer David Shayler, has been reported as an isolated event. Yet the 1996 plot is best seen as part of a wide-ranging and long-standing strategy by the US/UK secret states to dislodge Gadafi.  Seizing power in Libya by ousting King Idris in a 1969 coup, Gadafi (who intriguingly had undertaken a military training course in England in 1966) quickly became the target of massive covert operations by the French, US, Israeli and British. Stephen Dorril, in his recently published book on MI6, records how in 1971 a British plan to invade the country, release political prisoners and restore the monarchy ended in a complete flop. In 1980, the head of the French secret service, Col Alain de Gaigneronde de Marolles, resigned after a French-led plan ended in disaster when a rebellion by Libyan troops in Tobruk was rapidly suppressed.  Then in 1982, away from the glare of the media, Hissene Habre, with the backing of the CIA and French troops, overthrew the Chadian government of Goukouni Wedeye. Human Rights Watch records: "Under President Reagan, the United States gave covert CIA paramilitary support to help install Habre in order, according to secretary of state Alexander Haig, to 'bloody Gadafi's nose'." Bob Woodward, in his semi-official history of the CIA reveals that the Chad covert operation was the first undertaken by the new CIA chief William Casey and that throughout the decade Libya ranked almost as high as the Soviet Union as the "bÍte noir" of the administration.  A recent report from Amnesty, Chad: The Habre Legacy, records massive military and financial support for Habre by the US Congress. It adds: "None of the documents presented to Congress and consulted by Amnesty International covering the period 1984 to 1989 make any reference to human rights violations."  US official records indicate that funding for the Chad-based secret war against Libya also came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel and Iraq. The Saudis, for instance, donated $7m to an opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (also backed by French intelligence and the CIA). But a plan to assassinate Gadafi and take over the government on 8 May 1984 was crushed. In the following year, the US asked Egypt to invade Libya and overthrow Gadafi but President Mubarak refused. By the end of 1985, the Washington Post had exposed the plan after congressional leaders opposing it wrote in protest to President Reagan.  Frustrated in their covert attempt to topple Gadafi, the US government's strategy suddenly shifted. For 11 minutes in the early morning of 14 April 1986, 30 US Air Force and Navy bombers struck Tripoli and Benghazi in a raid code-named El Dorado Canyon.  Backing Reagan came the ecstatic response of the major media in both the US and UK. Yet the main purpose of the raid was to kill the Libyan president. Middle East specialist David Yallop reported: "Nine of 18 F111s that left from the UK were specifically briefed to bomb Gadafi's residence inside the barracks where he was living with his family." In the event, the first bomb to drop on Tripoli hit Gadafi's home. Hana, his adopted daughter aged 15 months, was killed while his eight other children and wife Safiya were all hospitalised, some with serious injuries. The president escaped.  Following the April 1986 attack, reports of US military action against Libya disappeared from the media. But away from the media glare, the CIA launched by far its most extensive effort yet to spark an anti-Gadafi coup. A secret army was recruited from among the many Libyans captured in border battles with Chad during the 1980s. And, as concern grew in MI6 over Gadafi's alleged plans to develop chemical weapons, Britain funded various opposition groups in Libya including the London-based Libyan National Movement.  Then in 1990, with the crisis in the Gulf developing, French troops helped oust Habre and install Idriss Deby as the new president in a secret operation. The French government had tired of Habre's genocidal policies while the Bush administration decided not to frustrate France's objectives in exchange for their co-operation in the war against Iraq. Yet even under Deby the abuses of civil rights by government forces have continued.  David Shaylerís original allegations over the anti-Gadafi assassination plot were vigorously denied by the government. But within the broad historical context outlined here, they do, indeed, make sense.  Dr Richard Keeble is director of undergraduate studies at City University's department of journalism and the author of Secret State, Silent Press (John Libbey) and Ethics for Journalists (Routledge)  http://www.medialens.org/articles/the ... s_2002/rk_secret_war.html

Simple-minded moral posturing on Darfur by celebrities and rights activitsts has made the conflict even worse...

Forget aid-people in the poorest countries like Haiti need new cities with different rules. And developed countries should be the ones that build themLacking electricity at home, students work under the dim lights of a parking lot at G'bessi Airport in Conakry, GuineaOn the first day of TEDGlobal, a conference for technology enthusiasts in Oxford in July 2009, a surprise guest was unveiled: Gordon Brown. He began his presentation with a striking photograph of a vulture watching over a starving Sudanese girl. The internet, he said, meant such shocking images circulated quickly around the world, helping to mobilise a new global community of aid donors. Brown's talk ended with a call to action: developed countries should give more aid to fight poverty.When disaster strikes-as in the recent Haiti earthquake-the prime minister is right. Even small amounts of aid can save many lives. The moral case for aid is compelling. But we must also remember that aid is just palliative care. It doesn't treat the underlying problems. As leaders like Rwandan president Paul Kagame have noted, it can even make these problems worse if it saps the innovation, ambition, confidence, and aspiration that ultimately helps poor countries grow.So, two days later, I opened my own TED talk with a different photo, one of African students doing their homework at night under streetlights. I hoped the image would provoke astonishment rather than guilt or pity-for how could it be that the 100-year-old technology for lighting homes was still not available for the students? I argued that the failure could be traced to weak or wrong rules. The right rules can harness self-interest and use it to reduce poverty. The wrong rules stifle this force or channel it in ways that harm society.The deeper problem, widely recognised but seldom addressed, is how to free people from bad rules. I floated a provocative idea. Instead of focusing on poor nations and how to change their rules, we should focus on poor people and how they can move somewhere with better rules. One way to do this is with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new "charter cities," where developed countries frame the rules and hundreds of millions of poor families could become residents.How would such a city work? Imagine that a government in a poor country set aside a piece of uninhabited land. It invites a developed country to enter into a new type of partnership, in which the developed country sets up and enforces rules specified in a charter. Citizens from the poorer country, and the rest of the world, would be free to live and work in the city that emerges. It could create economic opportunities and encourage foreign investment, and by using uninhabited land it would ensure everyone living there would have chosen to do so with full knowledge of the rules. Roughly 3bn people, mostly the working poor, will move to cities over the next few decades. To my mind the choice is not whether the world will urbanise, but where and under which rules. Instead of expanding the slums in existing urban centres, new charter cities could provide safe, low-income housing and jobs that the world will need to accommodate this shift. Even more important, these cities could give poor people a chance to choose the rules they want to live and work under.To understand why rules are the way to harness self-interest, and why such new cities could work where old cities have not, look again at the example of electricity. We know from the developed world that it costs very little to light a home-on average, less than one US penny an hour for a 100-watt bulb. We also know that most poor people in Africa are not starving. They could afford some light. Africans do not lack electricity because they are too poor. Indeed, reliable power is so important for education, productivity and job creation that it would be more accurate to say that many in Africa are poor because they don't have electricity. So why don't they?Why the right rules matterConsider development the other way round. US customers have cheap electricity mostly because rules channel self-interest in the right way. Some protect investments made by utilities, others stop these companies abusing their monopoly power. With such rules, companies win; efficient providers make a profit. But customers win too; they get access to a vital resource at low cost. It's the absence of these rules that explains why many Africans don't have electricity at home. It might seem a simple insight, but it took economists a long time to understand it.In the 1950s and 1960s, economic models treated ideas as public goods, meaning that once one existed it was assumed to exist everywhere. Some ideas are like this-for example, the formula for oral rehydration therapy, the mixture of sugar, salt, and water, that stops children dying from diarrhoea. No one owns it and you can find it easily online. If all ideas were like this it would be easier for poor countries to grow. But they aren't: patents and other legal rules stop some ideas spreading, while others are just easy to keep secret.When I started graduate school in the late 1970s I was convinced economists underestimated the potential for new ideas to raise living standards. The body of work that grew out of my PhD thesis came to be called new growth theory, or post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory in Britain (when it was infamously taken up by new Labour in the mid-1990s). Initially I just wanted to understand how good ideas, like those which make cheap electric light possible, were discovered. But then another topic began to interest me: why didn't ideas common in some parts of the world spread to others?Put simply, some countries are better able to establish the type of rules that help good ideas spread, while others are trapped by bad rules that keep ideas out. The rules stopping cheap electricity, for instance, are not hard to identify. The threat of expropriation or political instability stops many western electricity companies moving into Africa. Those that do set up there can exploit their power as monopolists to charge excessive prices. Often they offer bribes to stop rules being enforced, or pay bribes themselves. Good rules would stop all this. So to unleash the potential of the marketplace, poor countries need to find a way to create good rules.The challenge in setting up good rules lies in solving what economists call "commitment" problems. How can a developing country promise to keep the rules that govern investment fair? Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling illustrates this problem with the example of a kidnapper who decides he wants to free his victim. But the kidnapper worries that the victim, once released, will go to the authorities. The victim, eager to be free, promises not to-but there is no way for him to guarantee he will keep quiet. As a result, the kidnapper is compelled to kill the victim, even though both would be better off if a binding agreement could be made. Poor countries face similar problems: their leaders cannot make credible commitments to would-be investors.Rich nations use well-functioning systems of courts, police and jails, developed over centuries, to solve such problems. Two people can make a commitment. If they don't follow through, the courts will punish them. But many developing countries are still working their way down the same arduous path. Their leaders can fight corruption and establish independent courts and better rules over property rights, but such moves often require unpopular measures to coerce and cajole populations, making internal reforms excruciatingly slow. Subsequent leaders may undo any commitments they make. A faster route would seem to be for a developed country to impose new rules by force, as they did in the colonial period. There is evidence that some former colonies are more successful today because of rules established during their occupations. Yet any economic benefits usually took a long time to show up, and rarely compensated for years of condescension and the violent opposition it provoked. Today, violent civil conflicts have led some countries to again consider military humanitarian intervention, but this can only be justified in extreme circumstances. My point was that there is a middle ground between slow internal reforms and risky attempts at recolonialisation: the charter city.There are large swathes of uninhabited land on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa that are too dry for agriculture. But a city can develop in even the driest locations, supported if necessary by desalinated and recycled water. And the new zone created need not be ruled directly from the developed partner country-residents of the charter city can administer the rules specified by their partner as long as the developed country retains the final say. This is what happens today in Mauritius, where the British Privy Council is still the court of final appeal in a judicial system staffed by Mauritians. Different cities could start with charters that differ in many ways. The common element would be that all residents would be there by choice-a Gallup survey found that 700m people around the world would be willing to move permanently to another country that offers safety and economic opportunity.I started thinking about city-scale special zones after writing a paper about Mauritius. At the time of its independence in 1968, economists were pessimistic about this small island nation's prospects. The population was growing rapidly, new jobs were scarce in its only real export industry (sugar), and high tariffs designed to protect small companies manufacturing for the domestic market meant no companies could profitably use their workers to manufacture goods for export. It was politically impossible to dismantle these barriers to trade, so policymakers did the next best thing: they created a special category of companies, ones said to be in a "special export zone." The zone didn't physically exist, in that these companies could locate anywhere on the island, but companies "inside" the zone operated under different rules. They faced no tariffs, or limits on imports or exports. Foreign companies in the zone could enter and exit freely, and keep profits they earned. Domestic companies could enter too. The only quid pro quo was that everyone in the zone had to produce only for export, so as not to compete with domestic firms. The zone was a dramatic success. Foreign businesses entered. Employment grew rapidly. The economy moved from agriculture to manufacturing. Once growth was underway, the government reduced trade barriers, freeing up the rest of the economy.The history of development is littered with failed examples of similar zones. Mauritius was unusual because it had low levels of crime and the government already provided good utilities and infrastructure. The zone only had to remove one bad form of governance: trade restrictions. Yet many developing countries still can't offer the basics, another reason why building new cities is an attractive option. Cities are just the right scale to offer basic conditions. So long as they can trade freely, even small cities are big enough to be self-sufficient. Yet because they are dense they require very little land.To apply the lessons from Mauritius in countries with pervasive problems, the key is to create zones with new rules that are big enough to be self-contained. Big enough, that is, to hold a city. Then let people decide whether to enter.When I returned to Mauritius in 2008, I outlined my ideas to Maurice Lam, head of the Mauritian Board of Investment. Maurice splits his time between Mauritius and Singapore. He and I knew that Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, had experimented in the 1990s with a similar idea, establishing new cities that Singapore could help to run in China and Indonesia. These ran into difficulties because the local governments retained discretionary powers that they used to interfere after Singapore had made large investments in infrastructure. This convinced us that explicit treaties reassigning administrative control over land were needed. Maurice also said that countries in Africa would be open to this kind of arrangement. Some officials, eager to make a credible commitment to foreign investors, had already made informal inquiries about whether Mauritius would be willing to take administrative control over their special export zones.What could go wrong?Some economists have objected that a charter agreement between two countries will not necessarily solve the commitment problem that lies at the heart of development failures. The leaders of many countries enter into agreements, sometimes with the best intentions, that subsequent leaders or officials do not honour-as Lee Kuan Yew found to his cost. To guard against such an outcome, partners in a charter city must negotiate a formal treaty, like the one that gave the British rights in Hong Kong (see box, right). Under this arrangement the only way for the host country to renege on its commitment would be to invade. Even governments that resent having signed such agreements in the past almost always respect them. The Cubans hate the agreement that gave the US control of Guantánamo Bay, but learned to live with it.Another objection comes from those who study urbanisation. They point out that the location of most existing cities is determined by accidents of history or geography, and suggest, correctly, that there are geographical requirements for a city to survive. But they are surely wrong to think that all the good sites for cities are taken. Here distance matters, but it is not an insurmountable obstacle: Mauritius continues to develop despite its remote location. Flat land is cheaper to build on, but many cities have developed on hilly terrain. A river can provide fresh water and access to the sea, but with desalination, so too can any coastal location where a port could be built. Access to the sea is the only real necessity-as long as a charter city can ship goods back and forth on container ships, it can thrive even if its neighbours turn hostile or unstable. And there are thousands of largely uninhabited coastal locations on several continents that could qualify.Other urban economists fear new cities will repeat the unimpressive history of government-planned ones like Brasília, or Dubai's recent bust. But these are both extreme examples. The state was too intrusive in Brasília and almost non-existent in Dubai. Hong Kong is the middle ground, a state ruled by laws not men, but one that leaves competition and individual initiative to decide the details.The experience in Hong Kong offers two further lessons. The first is the importance of giving people a choice about the rules that govern them. Hong Kong was sparsely populated when the British took over. Unlike other colonial systems, almost everyone chose to come and live under the new system. This gave the rules proposed by the British a degree of legitimacy they never had in India, where the rules were imposed on often unwilling subjects. This is why building new cities, rather than taking over existing ones, is so powerful.The second lesson is the importance of getting the scale right. Most nations are too large to update all their rules and laws at once. The coercion needed to impose a new system on an existing population generates friction, no matter who is in charge. Leaders on mainland China understood this when they attempted to copy the successes of Hong Kong by gradually opening a few places, such as the new city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Yet while nations are too big, towns and villages are too small. A village cannot capture the benefits that arise when millions of people live and work together under good rules. Cities offer the right scale for dramatic change.The demands of migrationAs billions of people urbanise in the coming decades, they can move to hundreds of new cities. The gains new cities can unleash are clear. Picture again the students studying under the streetlights. By themselves, political leaders in poor countries won't provide cheap, reliable electricity any time soon. They can't eliminate the political risk that holds back investment or ensure adequate regulatory controls. But working with a partner nation, they can establish a new city where millions of young people could pay pennies to be able to study at home. And as these cities seek out residents, the leaders and citizens in existing countries will face the most effective pressure for good governance-competition.We know from history that the competitive pressures created by migration can boost economic growth. But strong opposition to immigration in the world's richest economies prevents many people from moving to better systems of rules. Charter cities bring the good systems of rules to places that would welcome migrants. Indeed, charter cities offer the only viable path for substantial increases in global migration, bringing good rules to places that the world's poor can easily and legally access, while lessening the contentious political frictions that arise from traditional migration flows.Intelligently designed new cities can offer environmental benefits too, a point increasingly made by environmentalists like Stewart Brand (see p39.) For example, Indonesia emits greenhouse gases at a rate exceeded only by China and the US. This rate is partly due to logging practices in its rainforest, and efforts to clear land for palm-oil plantations and pulp-producing acacia trees. Brand has cited the experience of Panama to demonstrate the green potential of urbanisation: as people there left slash-and-burn agriculture for work in cities, forest regenerated on the land they left behind. Similar migration to new cities in places like Indonesia could do much to reduce carbon emissions from the developing world.Investment in charter cities could also make more effective the aid rich countries give. The British experience in Hong Kong shows that enforcing rules costs partners very little, but can have a huge effect. Because Hong Kong helped make reform in the rest of China possible, the British intervention there arguably did more to reduce world poverty than all the official aid programmes of the 20th century, and at a fraction of the cost. And, if many such cities are built, fewer people will be trapped in the failed states that are the root cause of most humanitarian crises and security concerns.There are many questions to be resolved before the first city is chartered. Is it better to have a group of rich nations, or a multinational body like the EU, play the role the British played in Hong Kong? How would such a city be governed? And how and when might transfer of control back to the host country be arranged? But as we begin to explore these questions, we must not lose sight of the fundamental insights that advocates of the free market underestimate. The win-win agreements that we see in well-functioning markets are possible only when there is a strong, credible government that can establish the rules. In places where these rules are not present, it could take centuries for locals to bootstrap themselves from bad rules to good. By creating new zones through partnerships at the national level, good rules can spread more quickly, and when they do, the benefits can be huge.The world's fortunate citizens must be able to provide assistance when disasters like the earthquake in Haiti strike, but we must also be wary of the practical and moral limits of aid. When the roles of benefactor and supplicant are institutionalised, both parties are diminished. In the case of Haiti, if nations in the region created just two charter cities, they could house the entire population of that country. Senegal has offered Haitians the opportunity to return to the home "of their ancestors." "If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region," a Senegal government spokesman said. Outside of the extraordinary circumstances of a crisis, the role of partner is better for everyone. And there are millions of people seeking partnerships around the world. Helping people build them successfully is the opportunity of the centuryHong Kong: the first charter city? Hong Kong was a successful example of a special zone that could serve as a model for charter cities. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the only place in China where Chinese workers could enter partnerships with foreign workers and companies. Many of the Chinese who moved to Hong Kong started in low-skill jobs, making toys or sewing shirts. But over time their wages grew along with the skills that they gained working with educated managers, and using modern technologies and working practices.Over time they acquired the values and norms that sustain modern cities. As a result, Hong Kong enjoyed rapid economic growth-in 1960, the average income was around £2,500; by 1997, it was around £20,000.Even if it had wanted to, the Chinese government acting alone could not have offered this opportunity. The credibility of rules developed over centuries by the British government was essential in attracting the foreign investment, companies and skilled workers that let these low-skill immigrants lift themselves out of poverty. As in Mauritius, authority rested ultimately with the British governor general, but most of the police and civil servants were Chinese. And the benefits demonstrated in Hong Kong became a model for reform-minded leaders in China itself.

 The Nursery of GeniusA brief survey of ten magazines of influenceBy Nicholas Sabloff“A magazine,” Thomas Paine said, “is the nursery of genius.” Upon moving to America, Paine became a contributor and editor at the Pennsylvania Magazine. Not long after, he published Common Sense, the pamphlet that defined the American Revolution.Generations of young writers and thinkers have been drawn to what is an elusive project: to create a magazine that makes an indelible mark on the course of politics, art, literature, and history. Such idealists have persevered in the face of the debt, disillusionment, meager circulation, and general indifference from which all but a few of these publications inevitably perish.What follows are brief sketches of a certain variety of little magazine, “little” (with the exception of the American Mercury) by virtue of their circulation. They are not zines or self-published pamphlets or policy journals, all of which may also be entitled to a claim of littleness. The magazines here are united in their commitment to forwarding the causes of literature, high art, and politics; they are best remembered for helping to establish canonical writers and for their contributions to the intellectual culture of their day. The spirit of such magazines was perhaps best captured by Lionel Trilling in the 1950s when he wrote, “They are snickered at and snubbed, sometimes deservedly, and no one would venture to say in a precise way just what effect they have . . . except that they keep a countercurrent moving which perhaps no one will be fully aware of until it ceases to move.” The Dial, Boston1840-1844  Often considered the progenitor of the “little” magazine in America, the Dial was founded by “Transcendental Club” members Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like many little magazines, the Dial was conceived out of frustration with the other journals of its day. Emerson used the second issue to call for a native literature that represented American culture. To this end, the magazine published obscure writers and poets, most of whom remained that way. The most notable exception was its most popular contributor, Henry David Thoreau. The Transcendentalists’ interest in Eastern religions and philosophy brought the magazine more mockery than readers (“ethereal” was a common complaint): it never had more than 300 subscribers and Emerson came away from the project $300 the poorer. The magazine’s influence, however, has lived on. Resurrected countless times, in the 1920s the Dial became the premier Modernist magazine in the U.S. (it brought T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to American readers) and gave birth to a publishing house, the Dial Press, that carries on to this day. Poetry, Chicago1912-Present The flourishing of Modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century coincided with a renaissance in American literary magazines. Harriet Monroe’s showcase for American poetry was at the center of this efflorescence. Poetry published T.S. Eliot’s groundbreaking “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915. The poem had been passed along to Monroe by the magazine’s foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound. Poetry’s early years featured Pound’s promotion of imagism and, following the publication of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,” passionate defenses of free verse. It published early work by Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The initial pay rate: a generous $10 a page. The amount the magazine received in a bequest from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly in 2003: $100 million.The Masses, New York1911-1917 The Masses advocated for progressive causes such as socialism, pacifism, vegetarianism, and birth control, and published such progressives as Helen Keller, Jane Addams, and Bertrand Russell. The furious satires penned by its cartoonist, Art Young—he pilloried everything from the press to Jesus, and depicted capitalism as an overstuffed bald eagle—brought the magazine its share of controversy and notoriety. Edited by Columbia professor Max Eastman, the Masses was radical enough to print the intrepid American journalist and revolutionary socialist John Reed and antiwar enough to run afoul of the Espionage Act in 1917, resulting in a series of trials that led to the magazine’s demise. After folding in 1917, Eastman and his colleagues returned a year later with theLiberator. Many of these same editors, though not Eastman, regrouped in 1926 to launch the more overtly Marxist New Masses.The Criterion,London1922-1939T.S. Eliot edited Modernism’s most famous magazine at night after coming home from his job at Lloyds Bank. The Criterion’s editorial office was his house. From these modest origins sprung a debut issue containing “The Waste Land” and a magazine that, in its first year, received contributions from Luigi Pirandello, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, E.M. Forster, and W.B. Yeats. In his effort to convey a European consciousness unlike  that found in other magazines of the time, Eliot’s Criterion became the first periodical to publish Proust in English. Eliot spent the following years trying to establish such writers as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Wyndham Lewis, while simultaneously expounding his defense of classicism, tradition, and Catholicism. The magazine never reached more than 800 subscribers and Eliot somewhat dispiritedly ended the Criterion in 1939.The American Mercury, New York1924-1980H.L. Mencken conceived the American Mercury as a magazine capable of taking in the whole absurd carnival of the American scene during the Jazz Age. Irreverent, learned, iconoclastic, and satirical, the magazine became indistinguishable from Mencken himself. It furiously lampooned his favorite targets— creationists, Prohibition, the “booboisie”—in the pungent style of its editor. The premier literary tastemaker of his time, Mencken published fiction by William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Sherwood Anderson alongside articles written by convicts, clergyman, lawyers, dishwashers, and outdoorsmen. At its peak, in 1928, the American Mercuryhad 84,000 subscribers. The magazine lost momentum after 1929 when Mencken’s satirical edge, defense of laissez-faire economics, and disdain for the proletariat put him out of step with the culture of the Depression era. The man Walter Lippmann once referred to as “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people” left the magazine in 1933.Partisan Review,New York1934-2003It has been said of Partisan Review that despite rarely having more than ten thousand subscribers, it had the right ten thousand subscribers. When people get nostalgic for the golden days of the “public intellectual” in America, Partisan Review is never far from their minds. Though it began under the auspices of the arts branch of the American Communist Party, the magazine’s founding editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, soon parted ways with the party’s embrace of Stalinism. Staunchly anti-Stalinist and a defender of high art,Partisan Review was a magazine in which Rahv’s critiques of Marxism were followed by Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” The flagship publication of the New York Intellectuals, Partisan Review published Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and such classic essays as Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” The number of little magazines—Macdonald’s Politics, Howe’s Dissent—started by its former contributors over the years, often following an intellectual falling-out, testifies to its influence.Les Temps Modernes, Paris1945-PresentJean-Paul Sartre launched Les Temps Modernes one year after the liberation of France and at the height of his fame as a novelist, playwright, literary critic, and philosopher. It was truly a magazine of the moment and quickly became the leading exponent of Existentialism. (It, too, peaked at ten thousand subscribers.) The magazine published such titans of postwar experimental literature as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Raymond Queneau, and Marguerite Duras, as well as Sartre’s monumental literary manifesto, “What Is Writing?” The magazine’s name, taken from the Charlie Chaplin filmModern Times, reflected Sartre’s belief that engagement with the present moment was man’s duty. Sartre also believed in the pen’s ability to ignite political change, and in its first decade,Les Temps Modernes condemned capitalism and colonialism, and demanded that France depart from Indochina and Algeria. By the early 1950s, Sartre’s Soviet sympathies had caused all the original editors but Simone de Beauvoir to depart, and it was on the pages of Les Temps Modernes, in one of the defining moments of 1950s intellectual life, that Sartre and Albert Camus’s friendship ended as the two quarreled bitterly in print over Stalinism.The Paris Review,Paris/New York1953-PresentThe Paris Review, which began life in hopes of recapturing the literary spirit of 1920s Paris, wanted to serve its writers, and George Plimpton, its charismatic co-founder and editor, was not bashful about engaging in a little showmanship to ensure that their voices would be heard. While never as fervently countercultural as Barnet Rosset’s more European-orientedEvergreen Review, in its early years the Paris Review helped to launch Terry Southern, Philip Roth, and Jack Kerouac, and was the first to publish Samuel Beckett in America. Its “Art of Fiction” interviews have become an institution unto themselves. Forever hovering around ten thousand subscribers, the magazine is still going strong despite Plimpton’s death in 2003 and despite the belief of one of its founding editors, Peter Matthiessen, that “little magazines should have short lives and then disappear.”The Baffler, Chicago1988-presentFounded by Thomas Frank, the Baffler modeled itself after Mencken’s American Mercury, and like his idol, Frank loved to cause mischief by exposing the absurdities and delusions of the “booboisie.” Unlike most little magazines, the Baffler was built around an explicit thesis: that American business culture had co-opted the very idea of dissent by making it a commodity. The magazine spent the 1990s ridiculing one instance after another—from the Gen-X rebel consumers at Details to the peddling of “alternative” culture—in which subversion and rebellion were marketed as lifestyle choices and the counterculture was used only to reinforce the logic of late-twentieth-century capitalism. Despite only publishing seventeen issues to date, the magazine has two anthologies of essays to its name. These days, Frank can be found on the punditry circuit, having brought his critique of the culture wars into the mainstream with his 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?n+1, New York2004-Present  Over the course of only five issues n+1 has laid claim to being the most important new little magazine to emerge from post-9/11 America. Although its small circulation pales in comparison to such coevals as the Believer and McSweeney’s,n+1 has caused an impressive amount of commotion by responding polemically to the present era. Beyond liberal politics, the editors’ other great passion is the defense of the literary novel: the magazine openly declares itself a descendent of the high seriousness and sense of tradition of Partisan Review. Yet the magazine’s self-conscious tone and its ability to shift casually from discussions of European theory to dissections of pop culture are unmistakably contemporary. In recent issues, the magazine has begun focusing its breezy editorials on exploring the effects that such cultural phenomena as dating, casual sex, porn, and the omnipresence of cell phones and email have had on contemporary consciousness and the experience of everyday life.http://archives.jrn.columbia.edu/nyrm/2007/sabloff_well.html

波伏娃第二性新英文译本的书评。

David Fincher’s The Social Network, which tells the story of Facebook, is fast and intelligent and mean, a sort of screwball comedy without the laughs. It’s written by Aaron Sorkin, whose credits include The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and based on a novelised history by Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires. As long as it stays with the details of its tale – the faces, the clothes, the dialogue, the rooms, the parties, the sleek restaurants – the movie seems both restrained and sure-footed, willing to leave the thinking and the conclusions to us. But its larger plot movements are strangely dedicated to an insistence on two intriguing but evasive fables. One says that genius needs humiliation to get it going: so much so that the humiliation may be more important than the genius, a nicely faux-democratic message. The other says you can only make real money, money beyond dreams as distinct from just a lot of ordinary money, if you don’t care about wealth at all. Genius doesn’t calculate, even when it’s a computational genius.The film’s best line appears in a long, intense, information-crowded conversation before the credits. Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard, is sitting in a bar with a girl from the far less classy Boston University and boasting about his implausible chances of getting into one of Harvard’s fancy and exclusive social clubs. Once he’s in, he says, he’ll be able to introduce her to a better class of people than the ones she knows. For some reason the girl, Erica Albright, played by Rooney Mara, doesn’t take kindly to this suggestion, and the mood goes from lousy to worse. Finally she gets up and leaves, telling him that he will go through life believing that people don’t like him because he’s a nerd. This won’t be true. They won’t like him because he’s an asshole.Zuckerberg trots back to his dorm room and proves by inventing Facebook that Erica is absolutely right. No, that’s not quite the film’s line of argument, but it is largely what it shows us and a late attempt at a revision of Erica’s line lends it a weird retrospective authority. Just before the movie ends, a woman lawyer who has been present at the depositions regarding various suits against Zuckerberg and what he stole from or owed to whom, looks at our lonely hero, forlorn and with only his computer to befriend him, and says: ‘You know, you’re not really an asshole, you’re just trying so hard to be one.’ Then comes a truly mawkish moment. Zuckerberg hesitates, then types onto his Facebook page a version of the request that millions are now making and receiving every day: will Erica be his friend? No answer, film ends. Just as we’re wondering whether this little scene wouldn’t have been too soppy for David Selznick let alone David Fincher, a text crawls up the screen telling us how much Zuckerberg settled for: $65 million in one case, an ‘undisclosed amount’ in another. Facebook, the text informs us, is worth 26 billion. This is just a grand old American story after all. Nice guys finish last and assholes finish rich. If you’re feeling sentimental, you can ask the key, corny question. Yes, but are they happy?Of course a lot happens between Erica’s insult and this ending, and what humanises Zuckerberg in the movie is the possibility that he’s so angry not because Erica has upped and left him, but because she had the last word and she’s smarter than he is. He can’t have this. When he gets back to his room, he drops a few sexist and ethnic slurs about Erica onto his blog for all who care to see, toys with inventing a web-game where people – I mean male students – are invited to compare pictures of girls with pictures of animals, and then settles for devising another game called Facemash. This involves hacking into the records of the university’s residence halls, collecting photographs of all the female students, and putting them up on the screen in pairs. The game is really subtle. The guys just say which of the two girls is ‘hotter’, and chortle away. The game is so successful that before the night is over Harvard’s computer system has crashed and Zuckerberg is famous.Enter the Winklevoss brothers. These are two athletes, rowers, members of an elite that will never admit Zuckerberg even into its environs, who are looking for a programmer for an idea they have: a computer-based social network trading on the snob value of Harvard’s name, an extended electronic version, in other words, of the system Zuckerberg was describing to Erica. They contact Zuckerberg, who says he’ll work with them but does nothing but stall them for a month or two. Meanwhile he invents his own social network, and calls it The Facebook – later he drops the ‘the’. He and his friends, notably Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, who puts a little money into the venture, start to include other universities in the system, including places on the West Coast, and well before the end of the movie, the network has gone international. The Winklevoss brothers learn about it just after they have narrowly lost a race at Henley. Close but no cigar; just the news that the locals too have Facebook.Did Zuckerberg steal the Winklevosses’ idea? They think so, and the $65 million they received in the settlement suggests there was something ($65 million, to be precise) in the thought. Zuckerberg’s position is that he so transformed a lame, provincial project that he can’t possibly be taken as having nicked it: this would be like saying Shakespeare stole Macbeth from Holinshed, or Newton stole gravity from the apple. The case of Saverin is rather different. At the centre of the movie, with flashbacks radiating out from it, is the room where the depositions are being heard in the two cases. Saverin lent Facebook more and more money, and was CFO of the company. However, once Zuckerberg had met the charismatic Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), and moved to California, Saverin was edged out, and the film pictures him as the model of East Coast caution trumped by West Coast cool. Parker is the real-life inventor of Napster, a music-piracy system whose failure did more damage to the recording industry than even its success could have done, and what Zuckerberg likes about him is not just his savoir-faire, the sort of fast style that makes the poshest Harvard club look like a garden party, but his sense of risk and the future. Saverin too is suing Zuckerberg, ostensibly for cheating him out of the continuing profits but in movie terms for betraying the only friend he has.The acting in the movie is quite wonderful, very disciplined and focused. Timberlake as Parker is charming, funny, reckless, even dangerous, but also nervous, an ex-nerd who hasn’t entirely forgotten his past. The film’s second-best moment, after Erica’s early line, comes when Parker announces at a party, as everything is being filmed, that soon all our lives will instantly be on the internet. Two minutes later the police burst into the apartment and take him off for snorting cocaine. Did somebody set him up? Saverin out of envy and revenge? Zuckerberg because he thought Parker was putting the company at risk?Garfield is good as Saverin: sympathetic, decent, but limited, and easily made to feel inferior, a nice guy who won’t finish last but won’t be near the front either. The triumph of the movie is Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. He manages that stolid, stubborn, stupid look that clever people often have, and when his expression changes, which is not often, we may think he is getting angry. But then Eisenberg’s closed manner robs us of any confidence that we can read any of his expressions. This is the whole trick of the performance. We can’t gauge the expression, yet our curiosity forces us to do something with a face that is held so long and so often in front of our eyes. So we keep guessing. Was that almost a smile, and if so, what did it mean? Contempt? Some milder form of amusement at the idiocy of others? Some of our guesses are irresistible, and might even be right. Zuckerberg’s social awkwardness, presumably real enough at one stage, has become a style, a mask, an aggressive pose. His confidence in his own intelligence, and his conviction that he owes nothing to anyone, least of all any sort of obligation to be nice to them, come across very clearly whatever expression is on his face, and his only weakness, it seems, is a defensive impatience: he just can’t afford to think anyone else has a mind that matters. He is a monster of sorts, and like all monsters, a mirror of something that humans want or need or fear. Certainly it’s as a monster that he is compelling, and that’s why the attempt to reduce him to a little boy lost, just a nerd after all, is so craven, a shameless reaching out for the Oscar-worthy stereotype.

开放源代码运动律师Lessig发起改造国会运动. 2010年2月22日发表于The Nation.

2010年3月18日下午三点半，接着上半场豪尔教授的《审思音乐教育：探讨澳洲大学巴里岛佳美兰音乐的教学方法》讲座之后，悉尼音乐学院副院长霍华德教授（Prof. Keith Howard）为上音师生带来了另一场题为《世界音乐：谁的世界、谁的音乐？》的学术讲座（见图一）。主讲人霍华德教授目前供职于悉尼音乐学院，任副院长一职。此前他曾在英国伦敦大学亚非学院工作。霍华德教授曾撰写和编著了16本学术著作，其中绝大多数是韩国音乐研究成果。此外，霍华德教授还发表了逾百篇学术论文。可以说，其学术触角广及韩国、吉尔吉斯坦、尼泊尔、西伯利亚和津巴布韦音乐与文化。今天讲座则以"谁的音乐"为主要设问，从世界音乐范畴、历史、分流、美学问题、版权和传统音乐保护等多个方面渐次展开，对现代世界音乐做了深入翔实的解析。 图一：霍华德教授为师生诠释"世界音乐"体裁及其相关热点论题   一、世界音乐的范畴和来历 霍华德教授首先明确了此次讲座中的现代世界音乐的范畴，即特指全球化时代进入商业运作流程中的，作为一种全新的音乐体裁而存在的"世界音乐"。在该范畴中，世界音乐不再只局限于作为地方传统的标识，而是作为跨国工业观念下的商品而存在，并体现出"异域和本土音乐"结合的"混合"特征。霍华德教授认为，世界音乐的出现和发展，其影响波及到了音乐人类学，甚至音乐学，引起了学术界的普遍担忧。在讲座开始部分，霍华德教授还给师生们介绍了"世界音乐"术语的来龙去脉。即在1987年的伦敦易斯林顿民间协会唱片制作人会议上，与会的世界音乐制作人在如何记录唱片名称，如何为唱片分门别类的问题上进行了几轮磋商，其中淘汰了"世界节拍"、"热带"、"民族" 、"国际"和"根基"等词汇，最后选定了"世界音乐"一词的全部过程。 二、争议一一站在世界音乐的两边 霍华德教授认为现代世界音乐存在两个分流现象。一方面是在商业利益驱动下发展起来的世界音乐；另一方面是音乐民族志学者观念中的各地区、各民族传统音乐文化。就前者而言，如时代华纳公司发行的《阿姐鼓》和新近流行的萨顶顶的音乐作品；就后者而言，特指如陕西唢呐乐班或西安古乐等古老音乐形式。世界音乐的分流引发了两边的互相指责。商业世界音乐领域指责音乐民族志学者们是"隐藏在丛林中的偷窥者。"或"世界音乐可以让音乐家谋生。音乐民族志者们却做不到"。而音乐民族志学者们则批评世界音乐的商业化运作忽视了文化自身的界限。他们认为世界音乐好比好莱坞电影，只是通过创造浮华、肤浅的艺术形式来吸引各种人群。   三、"扶手椅上听世界"一一世界音乐的生活方式 霍华德教授通过列举一些例子来说明世界音乐不是一种简单意义上对世界的"发现之旅"，而是"在扶手椅上听世界"。因此，世界音乐创造的是一种新的生活方式。例如目前在英国利物浦大学音乐系任教授的卡萨比安先生（Anahid Kassabian)就曾使用"音响旅行（audio tourism）"一词来探讨星巴克咖啡店和著名的世界音乐唱片品牌Putumayo所发行、销售的世界音乐作品"Café Cubana "和"Music from the Coffee Lands"。霍华德教授认为，咖啡消费者买进的不仅仅是咖啡，还包括一种背景音乐（ambient music）及其创造的新声音图景世界。这种图景式的音乐存在，瓦解了传统的地理距离。例如世界音乐作品"Buena Vista Social Club"展示了熟悉的古巴音乐和他者音乐的"混合"，而这种"混合"现象，正是各种世界音乐的共同特征。   四、从"生硬的结合"到体裁的确立一一世界音乐的美学问题变迁 霍华德在讲座中表明了自己的立场。他虽然认可世界音乐在全球范围内的流行现象的合理性，即年轻一代不再能够欣赏老一辈们所欣赏的传统音乐，从而现代世界音乐拥有坚实的观众基础；但同时保留了对世界音乐的批评。他认为作为一种体裁存在的世界音乐，其音乐上的特征往往体现在"异国情调与本土音乐"的"生硬结合"上。如采用欧美流行音乐中常见的节奏与和声结构、本土乐器，以及运用科技手段进行跨界创作等。因此，这种音乐即便保留了某种原生声音，但被保留部分已经不占主要地位。例如在作为三角州航空公司的广告音乐的世界音乐作品"Songs of Sanctuary"中，虽然融合了祖鲁人、科萨人、第绪人的原生声音，但正如主唱所一语道破的"这不过是各种声音的堆砌，不具有声音原来的真正含义。"霍华德教授言下之意，在现代社会中，在商业化运作的推波助澜下，没有人再去关注原来的声音的内涵和意义。世界音乐的忠实消费群体关心的是这种"生硬的结合"所创造出的新鲜感。可以说，在世界音乐所融入的他者声音中，文化内涵被剥去了，尽管如此，留下的"外壳"也足以支撑起世界音乐的繁荣发展。   五、版权归属一一世界音乐"中间人"的道德问题 霍华德教授质疑了世界音乐作品的版权问题。他认为，由于西方音乐家常常成为世界音乐"中间人"，即作为制作人等角色，因此就成为了世界音乐所采录的各民族音乐的版权拥有者。例如西曼（Paul Simon）的《恩赐之地（Graceland）》以1400万张专辑的销售量高居世界音乐销售榜首，而"Buena Vista Social Clu"则已1000万张专辑的销售量紧随其后。但就版权而言，前者属于西曼，后者也同样没有归属于古巴民间艺人。同样的，加布里尔（Peter Gabriel）在其作品《基督最后的诱惑》中，虽然融合了伊斯兰祈祷歌曲卡瓦利、塞内加尔音乐、埃及音乐、埃塞俄比亚和摩洛哥等地音乐家的作品。但乐曲最后的版权都归属于加布里尔所有。霍华德教授认为，这些版权归属问题成为了现代商业化的世界音乐所不可回避的道德问题。   六、"跟随传统还是跟随钱？"一一世界音乐与传统音乐保护问题 霍华德教授最后探讨了世界音乐与传统音乐保护问题。教授认为，学术界对世界音乐的关注始于玻利维亚歌曲"El Condor pase"。该曲被西方人西蒙和加方克尔（Garfunkel）用在世界音乐"Bridge Over Troubled Water"中，其引发的版权问题遭到了玻利维亚总统的强烈反抗。该事件直接促使联合国教科文组织（UNESCO）开始讨论如何保护非物质文化遗产问题。就非物质文化遗产问题，霍华德教授结合自身多年来研究韩国音乐的经历，为师生介绍了韩国传统音乐盘索里（p'ansori）和风物农乐（p'ungmul）的现代化发展，及其所具有的世界音乐体裁性质所引发的问题。霍华德教授认为，虽然二者被授予了"人类口头非物质文化遗产杰作"，但二者在现代世界已经失去了传统音乐的特征或内涵的认同指认作用。在所有可以下载的16首盘索里歌曲中，只有2首是真正的传统盘索里；同样的，风物农乐在2005年的斯里兰卡世界音乐与舞蹈节（WOMAD）中，已经经过了大幅现代化改良，成为了一种新的形式"Dulsori"，也因此，具有商业化的世界音乐属性的"Dulsoli"现在成为了韩国的国家文化象征。这必然引发了学者对于传统音乐境况的担忧，并以身作则地宣扬着保护传统音乐文化的意愿。特别是联合国教科文组织要求学术界积极参与投选非物质文化遗产代表作，在这种背景下，学者们不得不面对这个问题："留给音乐家的一个赤裸裸的选择：跟随传统还是跟随钱？"霍华德教授最后认为，世界音乐的完全就是消费主义，是一个关于揽财和追求利润的市场驱动的音乐产业。谁拥有"世界音乐"的问题，其实在世界音乐利益不能回归非洲、亚洲，以及真正拥有传统音乐的人们的时候，就已经自己说出了答案。讲座结束后，在座师生和霍华德教授进行了热烈的讨论，问题集中在世界音乐体裁的共性特征、传统音乐所在地区的人如何看待这种传统音乐、如何保护传统音乐上。霍华德教授在回应中认为，"混合"是世界音乐的共性特征、传统音乐所在地区的现代年轻人是认同这种世界音乐的、传统音乐保护需要从每个人自身做起。最后，上海音乐学院杨燕迪院长对此次讲座给以了简短却提纲挈领的总结。至此，音乐人类学系列讲座的两场讲座获得了积极热烈的反响，取得了圆满成功。综述：黄婉图片：吴艳、张延莉 

Not the word before the notion, but the word as notion and as historical agent.

钱学森在加州理工的同事和朋友回忆文章。

互联网继续向低端学历群体渗透。2011 年上半年,我国网民中低学历网民继续增加, 初中及以下学历网民占比从 2010 年底的 41.2%攀升至 43.8%。而高中以上学历群体从 58.9% 降低为 56.1%。

我刚从印度回来。在印度期间，我站在美国总统奥巴马最近发表演讲的讲台上给国会议员们讲课。这个国家最近丑闻缠身，手机行业一个涉及部长级官员的巨大骗局，让一个政客敛财高达数十亿美元。

但一些议员们也惊讶地发现，原来奥巴马向他们发表演讲时使用了一台"隐形"提词机（"invisible" teleprompter）。这让听众误以为他是即席演讲的，这在印度可是一项备受推崇的技巧。

自1948年以来，BBC每年举办里斯讲座，谈当代问题

今年是海顿逝世200周年，维也纳的2009年新年音乐会演奏了他的交响乐“告别”，这支曲子的特色是演奏者在最后一个乐章时，逐个离开舞台。