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By Elvin Lim

The generic Democratic ballot appeared to rebound a little last week, in part because of the Republican Pledge to America, the story of Christine O’Donnell of Delaware spreading in the liberal base, and in part because of anticipation of the One Nation march on the National Mall this weekend. Could it be that Democrats may actually be able to keep their majorities in Congress if this trend continues?A cold look at history tells us that the odds are still low. One of the iron laws of American politics is that the president’s party almost always loses seats in the House in off-year, mid-term elections. Since 1870, there have been 35 mid-term elections and on all but four occasions, the president’s party lost seats in the House (the average loss is 34 seats).

On these four occasions, the gains made by the president’s party were minor. Republicans and Democrats respectively picked up 9 seats in 1902 and 1934 (perhaps having the last name, Roosevelt, had something to do with it.) In 1998, the Democrats picked up 4 seats in part because of the public backlash against the Clinton impeachment proceedings. In 2002, the Republicans did not lose any seats (or gain any) and bucked the historical trend because the country was rallying behind the president after September 11. (Democrats searching for hope this year should observe that three of these exceptions occurred in year two of a new presidency; 1998 was the only exception to the famous “six-year itch.”)

On average, Democrats have proven to be more adept at losing seats than Republicans, consistent with the conventional wisdom that the Republican party is a more orderly party and better able to act in unison than Democrats can. Democrats have typically lost 39 seats in the house in mid-term elections (exactly the number the Republicans need to take over to gain majority control this year), while Republicans have lost an average of 32 seats in mid-terms.

The virtue of being a not-so-big-tent party is that there tends to be less internal disagreement within the Republican party than in the Democratic party. It took a Tea Party movement to create dissension within Republican ranks, and yet some would argue that the movement has only rallied and unified the base.

On the Democratic side however, value, demographic, and ideological pluralism has always been a double-edged sword. For here is the telling history of 2009-2011: whereas Republicans are united that Obama was a mistake, Democrats are far from united about what mistakes Obama has made. The liberal faction of the Democratic party, for example, began losing faith in Obama when he compromised on universal health-care, and conservative “blue-dog” Democrats parted ways with their brethren just when the president proposed a middle-way in the form of a government sponsored “public option.” This is the perverse outcome of the party boasting more registered members than the Republican party (or for that matter, any other organization in the world.)

If Democrats, unlike Republicans, don’t do unity well, then it may well be that they could be better off, or at least no worse off than they are today, should Republicans take one or both Houses of Congress this year. If divided party control of government shall come to pass, it would be because the Democrats were already splintered from the very moment they were blessed with united or single party control of government. Put another way, it may not really matter what happens come November, because Democrats were only united in name in 2009-2011 (and that was possibly what made the infighting more intense).

Indeed, D

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By Bram Vermeer

Science can create a better world. We are no playthings in the Earth’s fate. Here are my personal top 10 breakthroughs that are badly needed to ensure our future.

1. Smart irrigation

When farmers irrigate their land, they usually water it 100 percent of the time. But isn’t it silly for farmers to ignore the rain? Often they have no alternative, as reliable rain forecasts are not available. Ethiopia, for example, has only a dozen weather stations that report online. But nowadays many farmers own a cell phone. Google.org came up with a simple, yet brilliant idea: let farmers text their own weather observations to a central computer. That will allow experts to make a forecast and text an irrigation advice to the farmers. This is only the beginning for how information technology can revolutionize farming.

2. New energy from the earth

This century we will probably say goodbye to oil. I have great hopes for deep geothermal energy, but it doesn’t feature in many energy scenarios. Planners usually base their ideas on existing technologies. A breakthrough may make it possible to tap the heath of the Earth. If we can really learn how to drill 5 to 10 kilometers through hard rock, we can make many artificial geysers. That would make large amounts of energy available within the next 20 years. A few trials are already underway. If they succeed, we’ll have to completely revise our energy future.

3. Solar cells printed on rollers

For solar energy to provide 5 percent of the world’s energy needs, we would need to cover a surface as large as California with solar cells. We have no way of doing that with current solar cell technology, except if we start using plastic or other thin materials that can be processed on rollers. That means you can use printing techniques, which allow for faster production. Plastic solar cells have progressed over the past decade from a scientific curiosity to a promising breakthrough technology. But we need to improve their lifespan and efficiency.

4. A factory in a shoebox

Size matters. Modern electronics makes it perfectly viable to minimize the size of a chemical plant without sacrificing efficiency. So why not reverse the trend of sizing up installations and start shrinking the equipment? You can miniaturize all the vessels, pipes, and distillation columns that make up a chemical plant—down to the size of a shoebox. The local supermarket could produce your washing powder. No logistics required.

5. Personal genetic profile

Long before 2030, all parents in the US will probably be able to afford to have their baby’s DNA sequenced. Knowing the details of the DNA will make it easier to predict the effects of pharmaceuticals. And it will generate a mass of significant data for scientific research, which will further accelerate progress. Probably we’ll learn that nurture may compensate for our genetic nature. When DNA tells us where our weaknesses lie, we’ll probably start training to improve on that. Learning from DNA will make us less dependent on our genetic fate.

6. Fertilizer factories in Africa

Africa currently imports most of its fertilizers. So why not produce them locally? This would reduce the hassle of transportation on bad roads and connecting to international markets. It would bring the benefits of the Green Revolution to rural communities. Technically, we ‘would have to scale down the chemical installations to meet the local requirements, but new developments in chemistry will make that possible.

7. Antidote for the real pandemic

Not much happened in the 2009 pandemic. But we learned that 85 percent of the world’s population has little

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By Edward Zelinsky

The United States is in the midst of a “free lunch” campaign in which Republicans and Democrats alike promise painless resolution of our budgetary problems. As a result, neither party will have an electoral mandate for the hard choices necessary to tackle our fiscal quandaries. Both parties are squandering an important opportunity to mold public opinion and set the stage for meaningful budgetary discipline.

In a recent survey of the U.S. economy, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concluded, with considerable understatement, that “the United States faces challenging budgetary prospects.”

This conclusion should surprise no one. The history and current reality are there for all to see: In 2001 and 2003, the Bush Administration and Congress reduced federal income taxes significantly. Instead of decreasing federal spending to pay for these tax reductions, the Bush Administration presided over significant increases of military and domestic outlays as well as unrestrained growth of so-called “entitlement” spending – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. The Obama Administration has continued and exacerbated this trend. At the state and local levels of government, budgetary prospects often even worse as unfunded pension obligations and unfinanced retiree health benefits balloon.

To be sure, there is much contemporary political rhetoric about the need for fiscal discipline. President Obama has appointed a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Tea Party candidates successfully exploit growing public anxiety about budgetary deficits.

However, none of this should be taken too seriously. President Obama’s deficit commission is scheduled to report only after this November’s elections. We have become inured to public images of Tea Party activists denouncing federal spending – except for their own Social Security and Medicare payments. The House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” promises fiscal responsibility while also refusing to reduce defense spending or spending which affects seniors.

The net result has been a free lunch campaign in which Democrats and Republicans alike promise budgetary discipline but refuse to specify how they will achieve it. The bi-partisan message to the electorate is that public deficits can be controlled without pain.

This, of course, is untrue.

Undoubtedly, it is considered wise politics to promise tax reductions and vague spending restraints while ignoring the tough choices necessary to put our budgetary house in order. However, in the long run, the promise of a free lunch will prove to be poor politics.

Empty, anodyne campaigns result in elections without mandates. Postponing the real discussion until after the election forfeits the opportunity to establish an electoral basis for the painful actions necessary to eliminate federal and state budget deficits.

In ordinary times, off-year elections are low key affairs in which the President’s party typically loses some or all of the congressional seats it gained in the prior presidential election. Conventionally, such off-year elections are preceded by locally-oriented campaigns.

However, these are not ordinary times. We are barely recovering from the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s and confront current and projected budgetary deficits of unprecedented magnitude. In this historically unique setting, the 2010 campaign is an opportunity for the two parties to form electoral mandates by specifying how they wil

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By Geoffrey Greif

Can you believe the word “bromance” has now made it into the accepted lexicon through its addition to the New Oxford American Dictionary? I, for one, could not be more tickled.  Imagine: men now have their own word that captures our platonic affection for each other.  Will “manfriend” be far behind?

To what can we credit this? Men have always had guy friends but, until fairly recently, showing affection physically and verbally toward that guy might brand you as gay.  Many years ago – think back to the 19^th century and earlier – it was okay for men to share their affection for each other.  Sociologist Peter Nardi notes that men would express love to each other in their letters.  Abraham Lincoln, before he became president, shared his bed with his good friend, Joshua Speed.  These non-sexual relationships, born in Lincoln’s case out of financial necessity and physical warmth on cold Springfield nights, became frowned upon by the late 19^th century.  With changing women’s roles and with blacks entering the workforce, white men were threatened.   They adopted a hyper-sexualized sense of masculinity, according to sociologist Michael Kimmel, which came to exclude the physical and emotional expression of positive feelings towards another man. Freudian psychology further concretized beliefs about “normal” development which did include homosexuality.  All of this fit well within the American culture’s sense of “rugged individualism” that obtains to some extent today.  Many heterosexual men would not feel comfortable today sharing a bed with another man or going to an intimate French restaurant and opening a bottle of Pinot Noir.  Relocate to the sports bar instead.  There, men can carry out their shoulder-to-shoulder friendships as they get together with friends to “do something.” Contrast that with women’s face-to-face friendships where they feel more comfortable talking to each other without the distractions of sports.

Given this, it is interesting that the culture has grown within the last few years to allow men the freedom again of expressing their affection for each other.  Movies like, “I Love You, Man” starring Paul Rudd have helped.  Commercials that joke about men being close with each other also help. To my thinking, anything that allows men (and women) to express themselves more openly is a good thing. If giving a term to close male friendships is what it takes, I am for it because people with friends live longer, healthier lives.

Geoffrey Greif is Professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and the author of Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships.

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By Anatoly Liberman

I am looking at the backlog of questions and comments for two months (there were no monthly gleanings at the end of August) and, first of all, want to thank everybody who has read the blog, reinforced my conclusions, disagreed or corrected me, given additional information, and asked questions.

Can American Sign Language (ASL) be viewed as having literacy?  Words mean what people make them mean, and perhaps literacy can be understood in senses not familiar to the majority of speakers.  The term computer literacy has almost turned literacy into a synonym for skills, and yet literacy presupposes an ability to read and write.  Someone who can do neither is illiterate.  Oral societies that later introduced a script are sometimes referred to as preliterate.  From this point of view, ASL does not look to me as a language having literacy.  I am not a specialist in ASL and argue from the position of an outsider.  All the deaf and mute Americans I know use English as their medium of written communication, even though they consider ASL their native language.

Is Standard English pronunciation a viable concept? I think it is, even if only to a point.  People’s accents differ, but some expectation of a more or less leveled pronunciation (that is, of the opposite of a broad dialect) in great public figures and media personalities probably exists.  Jimmy Carter seems to have made an effort to sound less Georgian after he became President.  If I am not mistaken, John Kennedy tried to suppress some of the most noticeable features of his Bostonian accent.  But perhaps those changes happened under the influence of the new environment.  In some countries, the idea of “Standard” has a stronger grip on the public mind than in North America.  I have often heard people remarking: “He speaks beautiful French” or “Her Italian is wonderful,” and those remarks referred not only to style and vocabulary but also to the speaker’s delivery.  Additionally, some local accents are usually called ugly, though from a linguist’s point of view, an ugly native accent is nonsense.

This brings me to some questions of usage.  Discussing lie and lay for the umpteenth time would be even less productive than beating ~ flogging a dead horse.  In some areas, the distinction has been lost, and so be it.  English has lost so many words in the course of its history that the disappearance of one more will change nothing.  So lay back and relax.  The same holds for dived/dove, sneaked/snuck, and the rest.  I only resent the idea that some tyrants wielding power make freedom loving people distinguish between lie and lay.  Editors and teachers should be conservative in their language tastes.  In works of fiction, characters are supposed to speak the way they do in real life, but in other situations it may be prudent to lag behind the latest trend as long as several variants coexist.

A curious detail of usage is the word dilemna.  Our correspondent asked why several decades ago this form had become current on the East Coast.  I confessed that I had never heard about this monster, but later searched the Internet.  It turned out that some other people are as ignorant of it as I was, but I discovered that dilemna had invaded the English speaking world from New Zealand to Canada.  Some children were even taught to pronounce -mn-.  Here is probably a situation that will provoke no disagreement: dilemna is unacceptable.  The first suggestion that comes to mind is that someone decided to change the spelling of dilemma under the influence of words like column,

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By Alec Ryrie

My book started out as a bit of fun, trying to tell a rollicking good story. I did that, I hope, but I also ended up somewhere more controversial than I expected: caught in the ongoing crossfire between science and religion. What I realised is that you can’t make sense of their relationship without inviting a third ugly sister to the party: magic.

The links between science and magic are pretty obvious. Science, basically, is magic that works. A lot of things that look pretty scientific to us were labelled ‘magic’ in the pre-modern period: chemistry, magnetism, even hydraulics – to say nothing of medicine. The only real difference is that modern science has a rigorous experimental basis. Arthur C. Clarke famously said that sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. But to the novice, all science is indistinguishable from magic. You try showing a magnet to an astonished four-year-old and asking them how you did it.

Of course, science and magic are supposed to be enemies nowadays. Scientists despise magic, but still read their children fairy tales. Modern pagans dislike ‘scientism’ but they love information technology.

Religion and magic have the same sort of ambiguous relationship. They’re obviously connected: both trying to bring humanity in touch with supernatural powers. And they hate each other: the Abrahamic religions, at least, have always seen magic as heretical if not diabolical, and they view the other way isn’t much more complimentary. But the line between the two is pretty fuzzy. The theory is that magic is about trying to manipulate supernatural powers (with the magician in charge of the process) while religion is about submitting to or petitioning those powers (with God in charge). In practice, that breaks down, as magicians seek transcendent experiences and priests promulgate infallible books or sacraments.

In Christianity, though, this kind of talk has a confessional edge to it. Protestants have always argued that their (OK, full disclosure: our) form of Christianity is less tainted by magic, while Catholicism is riddled with superstition, obscurantism and priestcraft. Writing this book convinced me that this is nonsense.

Yes, Catholicism is more ritualistic. But early Protestantism was up to its neck in magic too. How could it not be? The best minds of the sixteenth century all took magic immensely seriously. It’s true that Protestants were uneasy about the way astrology (say) was being used, but they found it easier to mock it than to prove it wrong. And when they do mock it they sound crude, like flat-earthers denying the moon landings, or creationists using what Richard Dawkins calls ‘the argument from personal incredulity’ to deny evolution.

The truth was that, in the sixteenth century, only a fool would deny that magic was real. The Renaissance was turning the world upside down, sending the Earth round the Sun; explorers were discovering whole new continents. As I say in the book:

In our own age, scepticism and disbelief seem intellectually sophisticated; in the sixteenth century, they seemed self-limiting and perverse. It was unmistakable that there were more things in heaven and earth than had been dreamed of in the old philosophies. Credulity, or at least a willingness to believe, was the only sensible way of looking at the world. And when you have adopted a new mathematics, a new astronomy, a new geography and a new religion, why balk at a new magic?

So I hope the story I’m telling in this book has a serious point to make. I’m not trying to persuade anyone to be a magician (heaven forbid), but to recognise that one of the reasons science and religion have been so antagonistic is that they have a third sibling: this is a family quarrel. And both of them could do with hearing their sister’s wa

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By Craig Robertson

1) The passport in its modern form is a product of World War I.  During the war most countries introduced emergency passport requirements that became permanent in the 1920s under the guidance of the League of Nations. Prior to World War I in the absence of required passports and visas immigration and government officials along the U.S. border used people’s physical appearance to determine if they were entitled to enter the country. Inspectors were confident they knew what an “American” looked liked, along with their ability to “recognize” non-citizens who where banned such as prostitutes, imbeciles, and those too sick to work.

2) Middle-class and the more well-to-do resisted the implementation of passport requirements creating what was labeled the “passport nuisance” in the 1920s. With little experience of the need to prove identity through documents the passport became the site where people objected to perceived affront of a government not trusting its citizens. Identity documents were for people who could not be trusted such as criminals and the insane. They were not for people who simply wanted to travel.

3) The federal government did not claim universal birth registration until 1930; in the early 1940s the Census Bureau estimated that 40% of the population did not have a birth certificate. This example of the limited administrative reach of the federal government hindered attempts to create a rigorous application process for the passport.

4) Prior to the 14^th Amendment free African Americans used passport applications to support their citizenship claims. These applications for optional passports exploited the tension between federal and state citizenship and inconsistencies in State Department passport policy.

5) The State Department frequently used the passport promote good behavior and to discourage behavior that could be considered inappropriate especially in regard to the family: in an era of optional passports the State Department encouraged the issuance of one passport for married couple or an entire household in the name of the husband; in the late 1880s the State Department refused to issue passports to Mormons traveling abroad on the grounds they were assumed to be recruiting people for polygamy; in the early 1920s the State Department fought with some success a demand that married women be able to get passports issued in their maiden names.

6) From 1928 until 1977 two women ran the Passport Division, both of who were ultimately forced out of their positions. Appointed in 1928, Ruth Shipley the first woman to head a division in the State Department became notorious, publicly represented as “Ma Shipley” the individual who read and decided on all passport applications. For opponents Shipley’s Passport Division was “government by a woman, rather than by law.” She was removed when her refusals, often done without recording reasons in files, became part of   controversy over the denial of passports to suspected communists in the early 1950s. She was replaced in 1953 by Francis Knight who quickly earned the title “the J. Edgar Hoover of the State Department” but oversaw passports for a quarter of a century before being removed.

Craig Robertson is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. His new book, The Passport in America: The History of A Document, examines how “proof of identity” became so crucial in America. Through addressing questions of identification and surveillance, the history of the passport is revealed.

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By Elvin Lim

The Republican “Pledge to America” is an attempt to show that the Republicans are more than a Party of No. The Pledge to America, however, is just a clever way to disguise a set of promises to undo or not do; but it is not ultimately a pledge to do anything.

Party platforms make a little more sense in the British parliamentary system, from whence they developed, because parliamentary sovereignty there does not have to contend with the separation of powers. But the Republican’s watered-down platform is a stunt if only for one reason alone. It’s called the presidential veto, and the Pledge exaggerates what Republican takeovers in one or both chambers of Congress in November could achieve.  This is a Pledge of faux intentions because Republicans know full well that it would only take a stroke of a presidential pen and almost every one of the proposals contained in the Pledge will not see the legislative light of day. If Democrats think they had it tough in the last two years trying to get 60 senators on board with each of their proposed bills, wait till the Republicans try getting 67.

The Pledge, then, is not even governing by campaigning, because it is pretend-governing by campaigning. How the Republicans are going to deliver, for example, on their promise that they will allow any lawmaker (Democratic or Republican) to introduce an amendment that would cut spending on any spending bill boggles the mind. What if the likes of Dennis Kucinich introduces amendments to reduce defense spending in every bill and the Congress grinds to a procedural halt? And if that’s the intention (as John Boehner flirts with the idea of  shutting down the government), there is a problem there too.

At root, there is something fundamentally inconsistent about the Pledge. A philosophy of Government against Government is rather more self-defeating than the far Right admits. Not many people and certainly not many independents want to send representatives and Senators to Washington to sit there and do nothing or merely to undo something (like Obamacare). And Tea Partiers should realize that no politician is going to endure the campaign trail and finally get to DC only to make his/her job and reason for existing perfunctory. There is a built-in bias for government in the very notion of elections, and the far Right’s desire to starve the beast called the federal government cannot be accomplished for as long as the American people support Medicare and Social Security (neither of which are given much attention in the Pledge.) The beast is here to stay, so we might as well learn to tame it.

The GOP plans to unveil this Pledge at a hardware store in suburban Virginia on Thursday. The ceremony and hoopla may look patriotic, and heart-felt, and in keeping with our highest founding ideals. But the Pledge to America is little more than a publicity stunt revealing the danger of pretend-governing via campaigning in America. The solution to our troubles is not no government, but better government, and this nuance appears to be lost on the poll-tested slogans of this election year.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at

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The world’s total annual consumption of crude oil is one cubic mile of oil (CMO). The world’s total annual energy consumption – from all energy sources – is currently 3 CMO. By the middle of this century the world will need between 6 and 9 CMO of energy per year to provide for its citizens.

In their new book, Hewitt Crane, Edwin Kinderman, and Ripudaman Malhotra introduce this brand new measuring unit and show that the use of CMO replaces mind-numbing multipliers (such as billions, trillions, and quadrillions) with an easy-to-understand volumetric unit. It evokes a visceral response and allows experts, policy makers and the general public alike to form a mental picture of the magnitude of the challenge we face.

Here, Ripu Malhotra answers some questions we had about oil, energy, climate change, and more.

Q: What is the goal of your book, A Cubic Mile of Oil?

A: Raising literacy about energy in the general public. Meeting the global demand for energy is going to be a daunting challenge, and the way we choose to do it, namely the energy sources that we choose to employ will have a profound effect on the lives of millions of people. We have tried to provide an unvarnished look at the different energy sources so people can engage in an informed dialog about the choices we make. People have to be involved in making the choice, or the choice will be made for them.

Q: Why introduce a cubic mile of oil as another unit of energy? There are so many units for energy already.

A: True, there are way too many units of energy in use. Furthermore, different sources of energy are often expressed in different sets of units: kilowatt-hours of electricity, barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, tons of coal, and so on. Each of these units represents a relatively small amount of energy, and in order to express production and consumption at a global or national scale, we have to use mind-numbing multipliers like millions, billions, trillions and quadrillions. To add to the confusion, a billion and a trillion mean different things in different parts of the world. It gets very difficult to keep it straight.

Q: Who coined the term CMO?

A: Hew Crane came up with this term. He was waiting in a gas line in 1973 when he began contemplating how much oil the world was then using annually. He made some guesses of the number cars, and the miles driven by each, etc., and came up with an estimate approaching a trillion gallons. How large a pool would hold that quantity, he next pondered. A few slide rule strokes later realized that the pool would have to a mile long, a mile wide and a mile deep—a cubic mile!

Q: What is your overall message?

A: Currently, the global annual consumption of oil stands at 1 cubic mile. Additionally, the world uses 0.8 CMO of energy from coal, 0.6 from natural gas, roughly 0.2 from each of hydro, nuclear, and wood for a grand total of 3 CMO. Solar, wind, and biofuels barely register on this scale; combined they produced a total of 0.03 CMO i

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By Dennis Meredith

Since Oxford published my book Explaining Research in February, I’ve learned a great deal about book marketing. And since the success of a book depends so critically on adept marketing, I’d like to share those lessons.

First of all, authors should always consider themselves critically important marketers of their own books. After all, it’s your book, so who else would know the most about it and care most about its success? Begin by assiduously filling out your publisher’s author questionnaire, supplying comprehensive information on the book description, unique features, newsworthy topics, audience, promotional targets, and sources for advance comment. Many departments, from marketing to sales, will use this information as a guide to their marketing efforts.

While your publisher will manage such marketing efforts as sales and distribution, sending review copies, and advertising, there are many marketing efforts you can make as well. The good news is that most of these are free or very inexpensive. Here are some marketing tips that I found most effective:

- Work with your publisher to notify your institution’s news office and professional associations about your book. The news office will likely do a news release and promote you to the media, while your associations may review on its website and in its publications. Also, notify internal publications such as the alumni magazine. They’ll likely review it.

- Offer to be a “media expert” on your topic. Volunteer to be listed on your institution’s list of people willing to talk to media, as well as in national experts directories such as Profnet, Help a Reporter Out, PitchRate and the AAAS Science Talk Experts Director & Speakers Service.

- Promote your book and drive sales at your publisher’s website by including your book’s information in your email signature, in talks and articles, and on your institutional web page.

- Blog about your subject by creating your own blog and by “guest blogging” on others’ blogs about your topic. For example, I’ve created the blog Research Explainer, in which I offer tips on communicating research. I’ve also found the blog useful in updating and expanding on the information in my book.

- Write articles and op eds about your book topic for professional and popular publications and Web sites. Make sure the author identification mentions your book.
Market on Amazon. Ask readers who like your book to write a positive review. Create an author page. See Amazon’s Author Central for information. Have your blog posts automatically feed to your author page. Ask Amazon top reviewers to review your book. See this guide to getting your books reviewed on Amazon.

- Give public and professional talks about your book’s subject, in which you mention the book. Work with your publisher to organize book sales at public talks.

- Distribute your talk on the Web as a narrated “slidecast” via such services as SlideShare o

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In the second episode of The Oxford Comment, Lauren Appelwick and Michelle Rafferty celebrate geekdom! They interview a Jeopardy champion, talk sex & attraction with a cockatoo, discover what makes an underdog a hero, and “geek out” with some locals.

Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!

Featured in this podcast:

Jesse Sheidlower, Editor-at-Large (North America) of the Oxford English Dictionary, author of The F-Word

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Matt Caporaletti, “Advertising Account Supervisor from Westwood, NJ,” Jeopardy champion

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David P. Barash and Judith Lipton authors of Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Take Our Revenge

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Scott T. Allison and George R. “Al” Goethels, authors of Heroes: What They Do and Why We Need Them. Check out their heroes blog!

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By Sharon Zukin

Shortly before 8 p.m. on a warm September evening the High Line, Manhattan’s newest public park and the only one located above street level, is crowded.  Men and women, old and young, tourists from overseas and longtime New Yorkers have climbed the winding metal stairs to the former railroad freight line, now a mile-long, landscaped walkway, just to view the sunset over the Hudson River.  There are more people up on the High Line than down on the streets.  They are taking photos, chatting quietly, lounging on wooden benches and strolling between shallow beds of native plants, creating a new passagiata for the post-industrial city.

There’s a lot to like about the High Line.  It’s a gritty fragment of New York’s industrial past that was saved from demolition by feisty activists and wholesome volunteers.  It makes us think about how the city’s architecture was once built for function rather than for style.  It reminds us of what the rough West Side of Manhattan was like before a derelict Nabisco plant, where assembly line bakers manufactured the first branded American cracker, was transformed into the high-class bread shops of Chelsea Market.  And it recalls the days, not so long ago, when the Meatpacking District was a no-go zone for animal carcasses, blood-stained butchers and several kinds of street workers who made their nocturnal rounds, a far cry from the attraction for club kids and fashionistas it has become.

The High Line offers New Yorkers a novel way to indulge in two things that have become a passion since 9/11: spending time out-of-doors and hanging out in public spaces.  Maybe it reflects a hunger for community or maybe it’s a behavioral response to global warming, but this desire to be together in public flouts the ever-present eye of the surveillance cameras and revels in the diversity of strangers.  It’s the same passion that drives apartment dwellers to socialize on their building’s roof and eat lunch in the new “traffic-calming” islands that have been carved out of Broadway’s tumult.

While the number of people who use the city’s public parks has grown enormously in recent years, the High Line attracts a disproportionately huge number of visitors, as many as half a million in the first two months after it opened in 2009.

But this is what it took to “save” it:  A mayor – Michael Bloomberg  – who understands the value of attractive green space to brand the city for tourists and residents alike.  A city planning commissioner, Amanda Burden, who shares the city-branding vision and speaks the language of historic preservation.  A longtime strategy of “adaptive re-use” to find new business uses for old historic structures and an emerging strategy of “self-financing” for public parks, both of which rely on private funding.  Most important, saving the High Line depended on powerful backers in the “creative class” of art, media and fashion who have their own interest in redeveloping the neighborhood—in this case, the power couple of Diane vo

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By Robin Le Poidevin

Do we really need agnosticism nowadays? The inventor of the name ‘agnosticism’, the Victorian evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley, certainly found it useful to have a word describing his lack of certainty when he was surrounded by those who seemed to have no such doubt. But then he lived in a period of transition. Science, and in particular biology, appeared to undermine old certainties. On the one hand, churchmen were promoting the importance of unshakeable faith. On the other, there were philosophers advocating a materialist and anti-religious outlook. Huxley felt he couldn’t identify with either side. If the Gnostics were those who claimed to have access to a special route to religious knowledge, then Huxley would be an a-gnostic, one who does not profess to know. But perhaps agnosticism served only as a temporary stopping point en route to a more satisfactory position, a stepping stone from faith to atheism.

For Richard Dawkins, a scientist, writer and today’s perhaps most vocal atheist, we have already crossed that river. It was perhaps reasonable to be an agnostic in Huxley’s time, when it was not yet clear how science could answer some of the awkward questions posed by believers: How, if there is no divine designer, could intelligence have developed? What is the source of our moral conscience? Why was the universe so congenial to the emergence of life? Now we have some detailed answers, the idea of God is de trop. And so too is agnosticism, apparently.

What is Dawkins’ thinking here? First, the agnostic’s point that we can’t know whether or not God does not exist, is not a very interesting one. There are lots of things we don’t know for sure. We don’t know that Mars isn’t populated by fairies. Of course, we are not remotely inclined to believe that it is, but still we don’t have conclusive proof. Nevertheless, we don’t describe ourselves as agnostics about Martian fairies. Similarly, atheists can admit that they don’t have conclusive proof of God’s non-existence.

Second, not having conclusive proof does not make God’s existence just as probable as his non-existence. Moving from ‘not certain’ to ‘50/50 chance either way’ is what we might call the agnostic fallacy.

Third, a necessary feature of God makes his existence highly improbable, namely his complexity. Of course, the world itself is complex – unimaginably so – but then science has an explanation of this complexity in terms of a series of gradual evolutionary steps from simpler states. In contrast there is no evolutionary account of God’s complexity: his nature is supposed to be eternal. And that there should just exist such complexity, with no explanation, is highly improbable.

That’s a very plausible line of thought. The conclusion is that, unless you think you have overwhelming evidence for God, the rational thing is to be an atheist. But it rests on a questionable assumption. There is still room for an interesting form of agnosticism. Take a look at the third point above: that God must be complex, and so improbable. It is a part of traditional theology that God is in fact simple. Dawkins finds this incredible: how can something responsible for the creation of the world, and who has perfect knowledge of it, be less complex than that creation? There are, however, different kinds of complexity. A language is complex in one sense, in that it contains a virtually limitless range of possible expressions. But those expressions are generated from a finite number of letters, and a finite number of rules concerning the construction of sentences. A language may be complex in its variety but (relatively) simple with respect to the components and principles that give rise to that complexity. When the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz opined that God had created ‘the best of all possible worlds’, his

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By Elvin Lim

For Republicans to take over 10 seats to gain control of the Senate, 2010 Republican voters must not see themselves as voting the Bush/Rove Republicans (who were kicked out in 2006 and 2008) back in, but for a new type of Republican newly infused with Tea Party sentiments. The question then is, can the Tea Party be synergistically incorporated into the Republican electoral machine?

There is no doubt that the Tea Party movement has been a force to reckon with this primary season. Consider the fact that there are 37 seats in the Senate up for election this year, 18 of which are currently occupied by Republican incumbents. Of this 18, seven candidates backed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (two of whom, Bennett  and Murkowski, are incumbent senators) have lost to Tea Party candidates in the Republican primaries:  Lee (UT), Miller (AL), Buck (CO), Angle (NV), Paul (KY), O’Donnell (DE), Rubio (FL). We have not seen the Tea Party movement and its influence at a higher point than where it is today.

This has been reflected in the rising fortunes of the movement’s star. Of the 36 primary races the most prominent Tea Party personality, Sarah Palin, has supported, 25 have been victorious. This King-maker is newly revisiting the idea of making herself King in 2012, when she re-opened opened the doors to speculation that she would run in 2012 when she visited Iowa last week. Right now, Palin’s future looks good. But this could be because we are just done with primary season, where the most conservative also tend to be the most likely to turn-out. Check back again after November, and things could be looking very different. What is clear is the Tea Party movement is ideologically committed to bottom-up, grassroots politics. As a result, it is even more in need of a unifying figure than previous third party movements (almost all of which coalesced around charismatic figures like Theodore Roosevelt or Strom Thurmond).

Whatever happens this November will dramatically affect the composition of the Republican party and its thrust in 2012. Here are the best and worst case scenarios for the Tea partiers.

Best case: If Christine O’Donnell wins in Delaware, Sarah Palin’s fortunes will be looking even brighter for 2012 (for she would have repudiated the prediction of the Cardinal of the Republican establishment, Karl Rove, who has publicly criticized O’Donnell’s candidacy.) If she doesn’t win, establishment candidates will do better. (Mitt Romney, ever the opportunist covering his bases, sent an endorsement and a maximum contribution of $5,000 to the O’Donnell campaign the day after her victory.)

Worst case: Lisa Murkowski, competing as a write-in candidate in Alaska could keep Joe Miller from winning. Miller only beat Murkowski by 1,600 votes in the primary, so doing so was by no means a conclusive test of electability come November. If Miller and Murkowski end up splitting the Republican vote and giving the election to Democrat Scott McAdams in Palin’s own backyward, civil war could erupt in the Republican party because the Tea Party movement would no longer be credited for bringing energy to the party, but dark matter.

What Palin and the Tea Party movement have done, however, is shake up the Republican party’s modus operandi of typically always having an heir-apparent waiting in line. The GOP is going to be much less orderly in the years to come because the mavericks have infiltrated, and are now reconstituting its soul. What is undeniable is that 4 million more Republicans turned out than Democrats did in this year’s primary contests (and this is the highest Republican turn-out since the 70s), so the complexion of these primary results will  permeate at least some of the general election results.

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