Christopher Beckwith has recently published a new book on the history of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present titled EMPIRES OF THE SILK ROAD. He recently penned an op-ed on the situation in Urumqi, providing insight into the past and present of the Uighur people.
Chinese Repression in Urumqi and World Appeasement
The recent [...]

Over at Forbes.com, Christopher Eisgruber has a great piece that looks at the political nature of the Supreme Court appointments process. Eisgruber tells us that “the confirmation process has been political for a long time, and America’s founding generation itself showed how tough, and how ugly, a confirmation fight could get.” A point he demonstrates with the story of George Washington’s nominee John Rutledge–a nomination that was squashed by the Senate for political reasons.

Eisgruber writes, “Presidents have submitted just over 150 Supreme Court nominations to the Senate, and about 80% of the nominees have been confirmed. A closer look at the numbers shows that the odds of confirmation depend on some basic political facts. Not surprisingly, fewer nominees–less than 60%–get confirmed when the president’s party does not control a majority in the Senate. By contrast, when the same party controls the White House and the Senate, the confirmation rate rises to over 85%.”

So what does this mean for President Obama’s nominee?

Eisgruber writes, “All this bodes well for Judge Sotomayor, the nominee of a popular president just beginning his term whose party controls the Senate by a hefty margin.”

Eisgruber will also discuss his recent book The Next Justice in a Firedoglake Book Salon tomorrow at 3:00 PM est, hosted by Professor Rebecca Brown.

In the April 6th issue of the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner describes a “a document—labeled ‘confidential’ and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials to whom the CIA’s Mr. Rizzo would show it—that tells a certain kind of story, a narrative of what happened at ‘the black sites’ and a detailed description, by those on whom they were practiced, of what the President of the United States described to Americans as an ‘alternative set of procedures.’”

On Slate yesterday, torture expert Darius Rejali details how these “procedures” fit into the long and dark history of democratic torture–where they’ve appeared before and how they developed.

As Rejali writes, “All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern. The ICRC report apparently includes details of CIA practices unknown until now, details that point to practices with names, histories, and political influences. In torture, hell is always in the details.”

Rejali is the author of Torture and Democracy, the definitive work on tortures that are not intended to leave marks on the body.

Amar Bhide has an excellent op-ed on the resiliency of venturesome consumption even in times of financial crisis over at the Wall Street Journal today. Click through to read the entire thing, but here’s a bit of silver lining:

The good news is that the cutbacks are likely to be more severe in the less productive kind of consumption. History suggests that Americans don’t shirk from venturesome consumption in hard times. The personal computer took off in the dark days of the early 1980s. I paid more than a fourth of my annual income to buy an IBM XT then — as did millions of others. Similarly, in spite of the Great Depression, the rapid increase in the use of new technologies made the 1930s a period of exceptional productivity growth. Today, sales of Apple’s iPhone continue to expand at double-digit rates. Low-income groups (in the $25,000 to $49,999 income segment) are showing the most rapid growth, with resourceful buyers using the latest models as their primary device for accessing the Internet.

Amar’s concept of the venturesome consumer is fully developed in his recent PUP title, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World.

Two questions dominate our consideration of the fate of the world’s ancient heritage.  The more vexing and urgent one — how can we prevent the looting of archaeological sites and the illicit trade in antiquities -– is not the topic of this article.  The second one is.

“Where do the great treasures of ancient art belong? In Western museums or in countries where the civilizations that created them once flourished?”

This question turns on two presumptions:

Between January and October 2008, 63 pirate attacks were reported in the Gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia. Somali pirates hijacked 26 ships; fired on 21; and took nearly 540 sailors hostage. By contemporary standards, at least, these “pirate statistics” are remarkable.

But an equally impressive “pirate statistic” has gone virtually unnoticed: the number of seamen who survived their harrowing captivities by Somali sea dogs and lived to tell the tale. For example, all of the Sirius Star’s sailors were “in good health” when their pirate captors released them. And they’re not alone. According to data from the International Maritime Bureau, in stark contrast to the impressive number of assaults, only one sailor has lost his life at Somali pirate hands.

…

Even a single death is a tragedy. But the number of confirmed, Somali pirate killings is surprisingly small—especially for a band of Kalashnikov-toting criminals. This hardly comports with our image of pirates as fiendish, blood-lusting curs. What gives? Are Somali pirates pacifists?

Hardly. But they are profit seekers. And just like their 18th-century predecessors, Somali sea dogs have discovered that it’s good business to treat their hostages decently—or at least to avoid killing them.
Read on …

Andrei Codrescu, Romanian poet, NPR commentator, and author of the forthcoming Princeton volume The Posthuman Dada Guide, has written about dada in the classroom over at InsideHigherEd.com. Specifically, an intriguing assignment in which he asked his students to write a poem on fruit… literally on fruit. In the photo to the right, you’ll note Andrei is holding a grapefruit upon which a student has inscribed a poem.

Andrei also visited Princeton University Press in November and sat down with Editor in Chief Brigitta van Rheinberg to discuss dada and the posthuman life.

Photo: Andrei Codrescu holding a poetic grapefuit. Photo courtesy of Melanie Jones

Al and Marilyn*

Tony Rothman

Film lovers over forty may remember the scene in Nicholas Roeg’s 1985 Insignificance where “The actress,” who bears an uncanny resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, explains the theory of relativity to “The Professor,” whose wild hair leaves no doubt as to his identity.  One wonders whether Roeg could make his film today with impunity, because Albert and Marilyn have more in common than relativity; they have in common celebrity.

Several years ago I had a book in press, Everything’s Relative and Other Fables From Science and Technology.  Given the title, the publisher’s house artist not unreasonably designed a cover that included a photographic image of Albert Einstein.  The publisher (Wiley) had properly licensed the photo from Bill Gates’ firm Corbis.  One would have thought that would end the matter.

John Garrard is professor of Russian studies at the University of Arizona. Carol Garrard is an independent scholar. Together they are the authors of three books including Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent.

Whoever will occupy the “throne” that Aleksy II’s death has vacated will set his personal stamp upon the Patriarchate, but there is little doubt that the union of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian patriotism which Aleksy initiated will continue.  This relationship has been successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.  Consider but one small example of Aleksy’s remarkable achievements vís a vís the Russian military and its need to staff isolated listening posts in the Far North.

Russia still has universal conscription for young men, all of whom are eligible—including those who wish to become monks.  The Russian military also had a problem staffing the isolated and forbidding radar listening posts in the Far North.  These posts are located within what used to be monasteries, but had over time been outfitted with the infrastructure of the Soviet military.  No one in the Russian military has spoken on the record about the problem of morale at these posts, but it is easy to imagine that young men, without anything else to do but listen for up to ten hours a day in the frozen north would turn to making home made vodka on their off hours.

When Teresa Ghilarducci penned an op-ed for the New York Times back in September, she didn’t think what she was saying was too controversial. After all, she’d already made the case for Guaranteed Retirement Accounts in her recently published book When I’m Sixty-Four and her idea to allow people to move the funds from the 401Ks at the much higher August levels to the GRA plan would help many recent or soon-to-be retirees.

However, as you can read in this insightful op-ed at Inside Higher Ed–things didn’t go quite as planned.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Bee Wilson, food columnist and author of Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee, debunked myths about the quality of food in contemporary America for the Washington Post’s Outlook section. Thankfully, we’re reading this after indulging in all sorts of goodies at Thanksgiving dinner!

Larry Bartels, author of Unequal Democracy:The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age writing for the Huffington Post about the upcoming presidential elections:

C Students Welcome

Clips of Sarah Palin’s interviews with Katie Couric have generated lots of buzz about whether Palin is sufficiently well-informed about national and international affairs to be an effective vice president. Palin fans will be tuning in to tomorrow night’s vice presidential debate eager to see her allay those doubts, while skeptics will be viewing in much the same spirit as the people who watch NASCAR races hoping to witness a crash.