Apparently President Obama knows his stuff when it comes to selecting key governement positions.  The latest rumor from this article in the Wall Street Journal has our very own Alan Krueger (author of the recent book WHAT MAKES A TERRORIST) being tapped as Timothy Geithner’s assistant secretary for economic policy.  Also in the administration is Cass Sunstein (author of the PUP books A CONSTITUTION OF MANY MINDS and REPUBLIC.COM 2.0), Obama’s choice to be administrator of information and regulatory affairs, and Anne-Marie Slaughter (author of A NEW WORLD ORDER) was tapped for director of the State Department’s policy-planning staff. 

And last but certainly not least is Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, author of two books by the Press–one of which is more timely now than ever (ESSAYS ON THE GREAT DEPRESSION and INFLATION TARGETING).

From the NY Times:

WHEN the documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor speaks of a cinema of ideas, she means it more literally than most. Her first film, “Zizek!” (2005) accompanied the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek on a lecture tour. Her second, “Examined Life,” opening Wednesday at the IFC Center, recruits a wide array of thinkers and theorists to muse out loud about the role of philosophy in our lives, playing off the Socratic observation that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Examined Life is composed of interviews with a virtual who’s who of philosophers including several PUP authors–Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, and Martha Nussbaum.

Join Director Astra Taylor and Kwame Anthony Appiah for a special screening of the movie tonight at the IFC Center. Show times are 7:35 and 9:45. Contact the IFC Center for tickets and more information.

Yesterday, we posted a trivia question:

What is the state bird of Tasmania?

A trick question! Tasmania is the only Australian state that does not have an official bird. From Birdscapes:

Australia has the emu as its national bird (it is thought never to take a step backwards) and the state birds are:

• New South Wales: laughing kookaburra
• Queensland: brolga (a large crane species)
• Victoria: helmeted honeyeater (an endemic subspecies of the yellowtuftedhoneyeater—I wonder how many people in Melbourne could
  identify one?)
• South Australia: Australian magpie
• Western Australia: black swan
• Northern Territory: wedge-tailed eagle
• Australia Capital Territory: gang-gang cockatoo

Only Tasmania wouldn’t play this game (why don’t they settle for their subspecies, the clinking currawong?). But all these other states have a floral emblem too, and most have a mammalian one (in South Australia, it’s the hairy-nosed wombat).

The Evolution of Evolution”*

                                   Tony Rothman

            If there is a grand truth about science, it is that science is a collective enterprise.  Researchers trade ideas, borrow any that come their way.  Colleagues and rivals are indistinguishable, borrowing becomes what in other circles goes by the name of theft; opponents are generally recognized, sometimes not, more often in the vast flood of papers, lost.  Vanishing few are the discoveries made by a single individual.  Strange, then, that even today the media so often portrays the great advances of science as springing fully formed from the brow of towering geniuses who work in splendid isolation.

FRANZ KAFKA:The Office Writings edited by Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner, has been in the news recently. Read Alexander Provan’s thoughtful round-up of recent Kafka books, including this one, in The Nation. In addition, Eric Banks reviews the book in the Barnes & Noble Review.

Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn’s HEROES AND COWARDS, a groundbreaking study of 40,000 Civil War soldiers that reveals the benefits and limits of diversity, has been making the news in the past few days. Larry Gordon discusses the new book in the Los Angeles Times, an article that has been picked up in a number national papers including The Baltimore Sun, and David Glenn writes about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Just to recap, we are posting trivia questions drawn from the book Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience by veteran birder and former chief executive of Cambridge University Press Jeremy Mynott. We hope you will post your guesses and explanations below in the comments section. The official answer will follow by a day, so check back again soon!

Birdscapes Trivia, Question #3 -

What is the state bird of Tasmania?

Answer will be posted tomorrow.

Our Director Peter Dougherty was invited by the Seminary Co-op bookstores in Chicago to write about our new book ANIMAL SPIRITS: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism in their “Editors Speak” forum, and for your reading pleasure, here it is!  According to their website, “Editors Speak” will present a rare opportunity to literary and university press editors to discuss and explain the books they have published. While serving on one hand as a review of the book, we also hope this will offer a unique insight into the publishing process and the choices made before a book goes to press.  You should check out their site regularly to see what’s cooking over there. 

But I digress…. Peter shines a light on the fascinating back story of how ANIMAL SPIRITS came to be, and its role not only in this current financial disaster but for economists and public policy folks of the future.

Click to listen to the podcast of the Brian Lehrer show!

Yesterday, we posted a trivia question:

What have Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Napoleon, Mexico, Albania and the Royal Air Force got in common?

The question may sound like the set up for a bad joke, but the actual answer is that all of them used (or continue to use, in some cases) the eagle as an emblem. As Mynott notes,

“Eagles seems inevitably to attract the epithets ‘majestic’ or ‘magnificent,’ and they have been of enormous symbolic importance over the ages and in many cultures across the world. They were the birds of augury for the Greeks; the emblem of empire and power for the Romans, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein (not an altogether wonderful team, but the Royal Air Force uses it too); and an icon in many mythologies and religions (in Christianity, for example, an eagle is almost a standard fitting on church lecterns)…By common agreement the eagle really is the king of birds, and therefore the ideal logo for all manner of commercial as well as political purposes worldwide. “

Mynott also reports that The Scotsman conducted a poll in 2004 in which the eagle was named favorite bird and selected as an emblem of Scotland. Mynott writes of this outcome:

“But with just one pair in England and the Scottish birds largely restricted to wilderness areas, how many people have ever seen one, except on TV? You would think a “favourite” bird would also have to be a familiar one, like a favourite chair or book? Could you have a favourite film you had never seen, or a favourite town you had never visited? Or does the eagle’s mystique actually depend on its remoteness?”

The Woodrow Wilson School taped an interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter and G. John Ikenberry, two of the contributors to The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century. View the interview below, or visit the WWS Web site where they’ve posted a great article about John Ikenberry and his research.

Also, just prior to departing for Washington, DC and a new post with President Obama’s administration, Anne-Marie Slaughter lectured at the Carnegie Council in New York. “Everybody wants to be Wilson’s heir, or at least everyone in the last decade,” she noted at the beginning of her presentation before turning to the subject of the book in which she, along with Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock and Tony Smith, considers George W. Bush’s foreign policy in relation to Wilsonian ideals. A complete transcript of the evening, including an insightful Q&A session, is available here.

On Friday the 13th, HEROES AND COWARDS: The Social Face of War took the Page 99 Test.

The question is, did they pass or fail?

Okay, perhaps that isn’t the question, but as the site quotes the wonderful Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”

Not a bad way to check out a book!