Harvard University Press Blog

Hit the streets with your favorite academic philosophers

Off the page and into the street -- this is the premise of the new film Examined Life, which stars no fewer than three HUP authors (Appiah, Hardt, Nussbaum), along with a cavalcade of other luminaries, including the reliably histrionic Žižek (sporting, for some reason, an orange construction vest), who was the subject of director Astra Taylor's previous film. Grad students rejoice -- it's playing at the Brattle one day only, April 3, a date notable not only for this Boston premiere but also because it is this blogger's birthday. Other cities and dates listed at the Zeitgeist Films site.

U.S. can't account for nuclear material at 15 locations

When a number of institutions with licenses to hold nuclear material reported discrepancies between the amount of material they were supposed to have and the amount they actually possessed, Energy Department officials chose to write off the missing material instead of investigating, says a new report released by the Department's Inspector General.

With that news in mind, we offer the following excerpt from Chapter 2 of Michael Levi's well-regarded 2007 book On Nuclear Terrorism, out in paperback this spring.

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Security at the Source

No material occurring in nature can be used to make a nuclear bomb, which requires either enriched uranium or plutonium. Uranium mined from the ground must be processed extensively—enriched—before it can be used in a bomb. Plutonium does not occur naturally aside from minuscule quantities and must be produced in a nuclear reactor. Both capabilities are widely agreed to be beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated terrorists. Thus state stockpiles of these nuclear materials and weapons are the gateways to nuclear terrorism. If nuclear weapons and materials can be locked up by capable, well-behaved states, and if those unable or unwilling to lock up materials or weapons can be denied them, nuclear terrorism can be made impossible.

This sort of strategy is so compelling that it should form the foundation of any sensible approach to preventing nuclear terrorism. Only nine countries have nuclear weapons. Policymakers are confident that in seven of them—the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, and Israel— no government imaginable would ever want to allow terrorists access to a bomb or to the materials needed to make one. A more contentious debate exists over what the other two states, Pakistan and North Korea, might do with their arsenals, but many believe that they would not part with them either. Many more countries retain civilian stocks of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium, the indispensable ingredients of nuclear bombs. Fourteen states without nuclear weapons are estimated to have at least twenty-five kilograms (about fifty pounds) of HEU each, the minimum amount required for a bomb according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Another twenty-six have at least one kilogram (about two pounds) of the material. Three countries without nuclear weapons also have sufficient plutonium with low enough radioactivity to be used in a bomb. Although these numbers may appear to indicate a widespread problem, they actually describe a limited challenge. In contrast with, for example, conventional explosives, nuclear weapons and materials are available only at a relatively small, known, group of facilities that in theory can either lock their materials down or end their operations if adequate security proves impossible. Meanwhile only one state, Iran, explicitly threatens to acquire highly enriched uranium or nuclear weapons in the near future, in theory a problem that can be managed using a mix of international diplomacy, inducements, economic pressure, or military action.

Are we really "all in this together"?

And have we ever been since the time when the majority of us accepted the arguments of free-market ideologues who insisted on the near-magical power of "markets" to regulate human behavior for the greatest good? In the Chronicle Review, Harvard economist Stephen Marglin (pictured at right; hope he's got that scarf on today because it is freezing up here) looks back on the efforts of himself and his cohort -- those economists who came of age between the Great Depression and the antiwar movement of the late 60s, who, he says, "were aware not only of the virtues of a market system but also of its limitations" -- to stop being "part of the problem" and become part of the solution. As Keynes said, "If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!"

This argument connects to themes expressed in Marglin's latest book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, in which he explains how the assumptions that economists have been wont to make -- that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state -- in fact constitute abstractions that take the most important element -- people -- right out of the equation. These assumptions thus justify a world in which the isolation and alienation, the cruel abstraction from human contact we moderns complain about is not only tolerated, but in some perverse way encouraged for the sake of reigning economic ideology. Marglin, as you can by now guess, argues that we need to get off this track.

||| Stephen Marglin, "Why Economists Are Part of the Problem," Chronicle Review, 2/27/09.

"We want to demolish museums and libraries ..."

So wrote Italian Futurist ideologue F. T. Marinetti; now, the British Library has purchased his Tin Book, authored in collaboration with the visual artist Tullio D'Albisola, for the tidy sum of £83,000.

Put your list in Wordle

We put all the titles from our upcoming fall list into Jonathan Feinberg's immensely fun Wordle applet, which creates word clouds out of any text you give it, and this is what it came up with:

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Make your own at Wordle.

A couple links

It's Friday, which means time to trawl around the internet looking for interesting stuff to impart to you, reader.

• Insects superior to humans? In some respects, you could say so. E. O. Wilson, frequent HUP author, has got a book out with Norton on The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, reviewed here in the NYRB via Powell's Review-a-Day

• One thing about Augustus, he knew how to take a joke. But some rulers don't. Mary Beard on laughter in the ancient world. Her last book was on Pompeii; the one before that on the pride and folly of the Roman triumph.

• The Hollis Hip-Hop Museum, featuring artifacts from the neighborhood that spawned a musical universe (although denizens of the South Bronx might have something to say about that), opens in a new burger joint in Hollis, Queens.

• Scientists looking to weaponize lightning -- didn't the gods used to punish hubris?

Snowed again here last night (not too much though), hope it's warmer wherever you're reading this ...

Come for the gold, stay for the coal

"Pioneers may have been lured west by gold, but they stayed because of coal," says Sandra Dallas in her Denver Post review of Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. A good point to be sure, developed with precision and grace by Andrews, whose geo-historical (is that a word yet?) approach has elicited much comment.

Killing for Coal is part and parcel of a slew of Western history books we have done or are doing (see also Jared Farmer's On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape and Katherine Benton-Cohen's forthcoming Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands), in what's becoming an increasingly strong field for us. A westerner through and through, it seems, Andrews admits in this talk to the Colorado Yale Association that he never felt quite at home here on the east coast -- seems that the siren song of the Rockies was destined to call out for a native son's return.

Slow down?

With all the discussion about marketing -- Twitter is fun, but I'd rather do it than read one more think-piece about What It All Means -- there seems to be comparatively less talk about the actual content of what we're selling. Do ideas requiring more than 140 characters have a future among the young, the well-off, the "connected?" Will more evidence emerge suggesting that the medium really is the message, that the rapid-fire stream of info-bits that characterizes today's content delivery could actually change the way our brains process information? Are we trading in considered thought for a new model, a kind of broad but not-too-deep savviness?

HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters is a well-known proponent of "slow reading." It's not a concept set up in stodgy opposition to an emergent online world, but rather a technique for preserving what's of value in the humanistic tradition. Waters explains his advocacy in a new interview from ABC Radio International (that's Australia, by the way, not "our" ABC). Would Nietzsche have been proud?

||| "The Push for Slow Reading" -- ABC Radio International

Back into the pantheon

That seems to be the consensus on the effect of Norell's Booker T. Washington bio Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Shelby Steele in Sunday's New York Times Book Review:

No black man in American history has been more a victim of this paradox than Washington. And it is hard to think of a historical figure more in need of biographical rescue. Yet Washington is an awkward challenge for the contemporary scholar. He is so thoroughly stigmatized as politically incorrect that rescuing him could seem a political act in itself, and even a balanced book could be dismissed as a polemic. But Robert J. Norrell, in his remarkable new biography, “Up From History,” gets around this problem the old-fashioned way: by scrupulously excavating the facts of his subject’s life and then carefully situating him in his own era.

Previous coverage of Up from History on the HUP blog here and here, the second instance containing an excerpt from Norrell's book in which the author explains his motivation and modus operandi.

Stop by Holyoke Center for our Darwin Day "Origin-a-thon"

Folks, this is your chance to read On The Origin of Species out loud to a bunch of people you don't know. Harvard University, in conjunction with our friends at the Harvard University Press Display Room, located in the Holyoke Arcade in the middle of fabulous, not-at-all-gentrified Harvard Square, will today host the "Origin-a-thon," in which volunteers will read out loud from Darwin's signature work, two pages at a time, for seven hours. That's right, seven hours! Stop by the Display Room any time between noon and seven today if you would like to subject others or be yourself subjected to such an exercise.

Did you know that we're also releasing an annotated edition of the Origin of Species this year? James Costa was Stephen Jay Gould's teaching assistant here at Harvard; when Gould kept referring to the odd circumstance that while everyone talks about the Origin, very few people actually read or teach from it, Costa went ahead and designed a course based on Darwin's work itself. His helpful annotations form a good chunk of The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species, which we'll say is probably going to be the best way to try and tackle Darwin's masterwork if you're a modern reader.

**BONUS TRIVIA -- Some of the best sandwiches in Harvard Square are not actually in Harvard Square; they're at Darwin's, on Cambridge Street, just past Memorial Hall, across the street from Cambridge Rindge & Latin. Just get there early (like lunch instead of dinner), because they always run out of bread. There's a location a little up Mt. Auburn as well. Stay tuned for the Harvard University Press Cambridge Sandwich Tour, perhaps coming to this blog on the next slow news day.