Sharon Begley has a terrific piece on Newsweek.com about the just-published THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN, VOLUME 12, The Berlin Years: Correspondence: January-December 1921, edited by Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, Tilman Sauer, József Illy & Virginia Iris Holmes, and the Einstein Papers Project.  You can read this piece here.

Albert Einstein’s exploding global fame and budding Zionism came together in the spring of 1921 for an event that was unique in the history of science, and indeed remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional through the eastern and midwestern United States that evoked the sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. The world had never before seen, and perhaps will never again, such a scientific celebrity superstar, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.

Princeton University Press, as volume 12 in its Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, is publishing his correspondence for this amazing and critical year of his life. It includes the full text of 169 letters he wrote this year along with 180 that he received. Also included is a detailed calendar of his year that draws on information from hundreds of other documents. All told, the volume presents an exquisite and rich tapestry of Einstein’s initial involvement with the Zionist movement and with the United States, which 12 years later would become his home.

Over at History News Network, they are running an adapted excerpt from Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s by Gil Troy. The subject of the essay? Michael Jackson, of course!

It is not stretching to credit Michael Jackson as one of the trailblazers for Barack Obama, himself just three years younger than Jackson.

…

For those of us, like Obama, born toward the end of the baby boom in 1961, Michael Jackson was not just a phenomenon but our phenomenon.

Read the rest at HNN.

Chris Eisgruber, writing over at Politico.com:

Kudos to conservative lawyers Doug Kmiec, Ted Olson and Ken Starr for sticking to their principles about executive branch nominations. When the Republicans held the White House, Kmiec, Olson and Starr argued that Democratic senators had a duty to defer to the president when he nominated judges and executive branch lawyers. Now, with a Democrat in the White House, they have held to that position.

…

I and other liberals should remember their example — and follow it — the next time a Republican is in the White House.

We saw huge reviews of Portfolios of the Poor this weekend. Over at The New Yorker, they call the book “invaluable” and the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada describes the research as “refreshingly distinct.”

An interview with Intrepid Liberal Journal’s Rob Ellman is also making the rounds, appearing at The Daily Kos, The Agonist, Smirking Chimp, and many other sites.

Our complete Fall 2009 catalog is now available online as a PDF or through a series of web pages.

In the Letter from the Director for this catalog, Peter Dougherty writes:

A great editor once said that good publishing is always about something. At Princeton, what we’re about is meeting the challenge of creating a list with a singular personality, while drawing books from fields as different and divergent as applied mathematics, classics, natural history, and financial economics. We seek to publish a list that, as John Henry Newman described the work of education, “takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, far and near, and which has an insight into the influence of all these one on another; without which there is no whole.” We believe our Fall 2009 list meets this challenge with a special flair.

Princeton books have long been distinguished by intellectual originality and thrust, and nowhere on our fall list is this trait better displayed than in Mark Johnston’s Saving God: Religion after Idolatry or Avishai Margalit’s On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, or—from a wholly different part of the scholarly forest—Peter Paret’s The Cognitive Challenge of War: Prussia 1806.

Princeton books also frequently speak to several different audiences at once, both by bridging separate disciplines and through the kind of writing that makes the best scholarship accessible to general readers. In this catalog, Adrienne Mayor’s The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy offers an exciting story for readers interested in ancient history while also providing intellectual grist for scholars and students of classics and history of science. Similarly, Carlos Eire’s A Very Brief History of Eternity will engage not only readers interested in history and religion, but also philosophers and sociologists, and their students.

Finally, we are especially proud to publish titles that are both timely and timeless. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly will find readers among today’s banking and policy professionals as well as among economists and historians for a long time to come.

The National Journal has a new online feature–The Ninth Justice–dedicated to the “search to fill the Supreme Court.” Just this morning, they posted an exclusive excerpt from The Next Justice by Chris Eisgruber. Happy reading!

Over at Devex.com, David Lepeska has posted a series of short interviews with Jonathan Morduch, co-author of Portfolios of the Poor. In the first segment (linked to here), Jonathan discusses the research for the book and why it provides greater insight into “what microfinance, or what banking for the poor, could become.”

Christopher Beckwith has written a new book called EMPIRES OF THE SILK ROAD, the first complete history of Central Eurasia, and discusses the bad rap the Barbarians have historically received in an article recently posted on the History News Network. You can read the whole article here, but I include an intriguing portion of his op-ed:

“The popular Western idea of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and other famous Central Eurasians should be obvious to anyone familiar with the portrayal of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s characters in the popular movies Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja—they’re Barbarians!

But this is more than just an idea in the popular imagination. Despite many scholars’ addition of scare quotes to the word (“barbarian”) in a nod to political correctness, or their omission of the word entirely from their writings, the traditional view of Central Eurasians it embodies has remained largely unchallenged even among specialists.”

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth, authors of the new books SCHOOLHOUSES, COURTHOUSES, AND STATEHOUSES, discuss what’s really ailing California public schools, and a new way to think about funding.

Here is a sample of their article:

“The state could decentralize decision-making by stepping back from the myriad prescriptive regulations and by removing the strings on funding. This approach would ensure that money could be spent more productively. For example, the state could use existing stimulus funds to offer early retirement to expensive older teachers, thus reducing the wage bill when the stimulus funds disappear. It could also set up bonus pools for teachers who demonstrate that they are highly effective in the classroom. It could develop its data and analytical capacity so that it had some chance of ending ineffective programs and keeping effective ones. At the same time it could include student performance information in evaluating (and paying) teachers.

These are things that cost little or nothing but that hold some promise of improving the system. They are issues in other states also, but perhaps nowhere are the needs greater for improving the system - as opposed to just balancing the budget. What it takes is a commitment to improving student achievement as opposed to maintaining the ineffective system.”

Read the entire op-ed here.

The recipe of the month is a traditional dessert from Denmark–cold strawberry and rhubarb soup–provided by our art and literature editor Hanne Winarsky.