The Cutting Edge

In preparation for a performance of The Defiant Requiem, a somewhat dramatized version of Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem Mass, a video is shown months earlier to prospective donors. The video documents the heroic work of Rafael Schachter, a young Jewish composer incarcerated in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezin, outside Prague during the early 1940s.

Schachter, who was murdered along with millions of other Jews, used his years at Terezin to teach fellow inmates to sing this monumental piece of Catholic music as an act of hope and warning: there is a God and, while His mercy is great, He also promises a day of just judgment.

Edwin Black, a New York Times bestselling international investigative author, has spent a good part of his life’s work explaining human rights abuses that saw one of its most horrifying and efficient realizations at places like Terezin and Auschwitz but neither began nor ended there.

Black’s focus is forward as well as back. There can be no understanding of what happened to the Jews in Europe during the 20th century without appreciating the diabolical history of eugenics, which he wrote about in War against the Weak (2012). There can be no understanding of how a petty dictator like Hitler could achieve such power without appreciating his powerful allies, which he covers in Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust (2009) and IBM and the Holocaust (2001).

And there can be no understanding of the current Middle East madness, spilling out over the entire world, without appreciating contemporary Israel’s extraordinary formation (The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, 1984), the tremendous wealth to be had keeping the turmoil of the Middle East inflamed (Internal Combustion: How Corporations and World Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives, 2006; Banking on Bagdad: Inside Iraq’s 7000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict, 2004), and a cabal of parties who fancy themselves doing “good.” Read more ..

Iranian culture is tremendously rich. Art museums dot central Tehran, prominent Iranian universities teach art, and Iranians have traditionally been fierce patrons and collectors of fine art. Decades of economic mismanagement coupled with sanctions have eroded the Iranian middle class. Iranian society today is increasingly divided into super wealthy and poor.

Against this backdrop, the Iranian approach toward Christie's Auction serves several purposes. Christie's has 32 offices and salesrooms across the world, but only two in the Middle East: in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The Iranian Ministry of Culture's attempt, however futile, to convince Christie's to open an office in Iran would, in its mind restore, Iran to its rightful place in the world's cultural landscape. While Kish Island might sound like a random location, the Iranian government has developed it as an outlet to the outside world, the only location in Iran where no visa is required and anyone is welcome, except Israelis. Many Iranians visit Kish for its duty-free shopping and, during the winter, for its beach resorts. Read more ..

Through Baylor University’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project a remarkable collection of music that’s been housed in Texas is poised to add flavor to a new museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. 

Today, Bob Darden is a college professor in Waco, Texas.  But in 1960, he was a small child whose father had just brought home the family’s first three LP phonograph records.  Two of them, he didn’t care about.

“The third was Mahalia Jackson’s Christmas album," he said.  "And my parents say that at about age six or so,  that I played Mahalia’s album over and over.”

Darden’s fascination lasted throughout his life.  He eventually became gospel music editor for Billboard magazine.  Then in 2005, Darden - frustrated that it was getting harder to find this music that he loved -- wrote a letter to The New York Times complaining that black gospel was disappearing.  A man named Charles Royce read the letter “and called that day and said, ‘Tell me what we need to do and I’ll help fund it.’” Read more ..

Most Americans tell an identical story of the last decades of the twentieth century: Around 1968 the heightened political activism we call “the Sixties” began to overreach itself. Unreasonable, utopian demands replaced the practical, reasonable goals that had driven the civil rights and student movements of the previous decade. Those excesses, found especially in the rhetoric of “black power,” multiculturalism and universal equality, reportedly provoked a “backlash” of conservative politics. Around 1979 or 1980 that surge of right-wing reaction took over national government, first in the White House and then in Congress. Meanwhile, frustrated with a decade of social and political turmoil, Americans retreated from civic engagement. The “Age of Reagan” thus began.

A good story perhaps, but not one fully supported by the historical record. Using that record, Michael Stewart Foley offers, in this very readable and adept book, an alternative account of the era, one that discards the “two now-tired tales” of rising conservatism and declining civic engagement at the heart of the Reagan-era myth.

Such tales are believable, Foley argues, only if we focus on the period’s electoral and party politics and if we fail to take a closer look at what was happening in America’s neighborhoods, on its city streets, and across its backyard fences as the millennium came to a close. Instead, Foley urges us to turn our gaze downward and outward in order to look more closely at "another kind of political experience,' one that was 'much more likely to propel Americans into action' and one that has had a much greater impact on our political life than generally assumed. Read more ..

One of my favorite recent Guardian headlines — right up there alongside "Why do normal men turn sexist when they get in front of a barbecue?" or "Snowden's revelations must not blind us to government as a force for good" — is this one, to an article by Nick Dastoor: "A single man's guide to seeing Blue Is the Warmest Color." As self-parody, that could have topped even Julie Bindel’s "What straight men don’t understand about lesbians" of a couple of years previous except that, unlike her piece, Mr Dastoor’s turned out to have been a deliberate self-parody. I find that a hopeful sign. If even the unfailingly p.c. Guardian can recognize something of the absurdity in the political controversy surrounding Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or-winning movie — which, by the way, the Guardian’s critic absolutely loved — then maybe the islands of sanity in the sea of Media Madness are larger and more accommodating than I have hitherto supposed.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we can quite ignore the controversy or the politics in order to look at this very pretty and well-made movie as "just" a movie. No more can Mr Kechiche successfully renounce his or his camera’s "male gaze" at the naked bodies of two remarkably attractive young women who are apparently not lesbians in real life but are pretending to be lesbians in the movie. Or, rather, they are pretending to be what he, or they, or even certain authoritative lesbians themselves must imagine "authentic" lesbians to be.

A certain uneasiness on this point was doubtless what led the jury at Cannes, presided over by Steven Spielberg, to award the top prize not just to the director but also to the two young women in question, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, both of whom have since criticized Mr Kechiche for mistreating or exploiting them. That criticism is also, I suspect, at least partly politically motivated, since it forestalls any censure of themselves for acting like sexual performing seals at the bidding of a man with a camera. Read more ..

At a time of ceaseless budget crises, it may astound many that American taxpayers are deploying their precious dollars not to pay for peace in Israel, but to achieve the exact opposite: confrontation.

Each year, American aid, taxpayer subsidies of 501(c)(3) organizations, and other financial programs richly support political confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis, vocal critics say. Tax experts estimate that for every one million dollars in donations received by a 501(c)(3), US taxpayers must subsidize approximately $440,000.

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Tax-exempt charitable organizations are supposed to be just that: charitable. But prominent Israeli critics claim that highly politicized American charitable organizations, including several operated by some of America’s most prominent Jewish personalities, are actually working hard to destabilize the Israel Defense Forces and erase Israel’s identity as a Jewish State. Rather than engaging in charitable programs, outspoken critics say, these charitable groups are focused on massive political lobbying and fomenting internal political upheaval that make peace between Arab and Jew seemingly impossible. Not a few of these critics point to the prestigious New Israel Fund (NIF) as the chief culprit.

NIF grants steer millions of US dollars to scores of confrontation-oriented Israeli NGOs. Among the controversial NGOs is one called B’Tselem, which circulates video cameras to Arab villages that are hotbeds for confrontation. Israeli military officials assure that they rely upon B'Tselem’s help to document IDF infractions. But many critics in the ranks charge the cameras are calculated to capture the scene after soldiers are taunted into finally reacting.

One such critic is Colonel Benny Yanay, who represents Consensus, an organization of several hundred IDF officers. "The New Israel Fund,” insists Yanay, “acts against Israel—against the soldiers of our country. It is important to me that people recognize the New Israel Fund for what it is. It is supported by foreign governments and organizations so that Israeli soldiers will be weakened." Yanay adds, "Their budget is more than anything we have—so it is not a fair fight. We are not a political organization. They are political." Read more ..

Nicole Holofcener makes little movies about "relationships" and the anxieties of young to middle-aged women in a post-feminist, upper-middle class world where sex-defined social roles have become more or less impermissible. Her heroines must therefore live with a constant sense of anxiety that they are not living up to their lightly held feminist principles by continuing to look for love, to worry about their looks and by not being sufficiently self-defining. In such earlier pictures as Lovely and Amazing (2001) Friends with Money (2006) and Please Give (2010) she managed to tell funny and often charming stories of such women with few hints of any ambition to make a larger statement, either about feminism, its impact on society or the human condition generally — or at least not more than could be contained in one of the TV sit-coms she sometimes writes or directs in between movies. In her latest film, however, and even though she is ostensibly sticking pretty close to her formula and to female troubles, there are signs that she may be reaching for something bigger and more mythic.

In fact, the new picture, Enough Said, could be seen as a hip, updated version of the Adam and Eve story. You remember, the one in the Bible? Book of Genesis? Ring any bells? Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Eve (or Eva as she is called here), an itinerant masseuse in Los Angeles. Divorced with a daughter, Ellen (Tracey Fairaway), about to go off to college, this Eva meets her Adam in the hulking shape of Albert, played by James Gandolfini in one of his last screen roles. At the same party she meets a new client, Marianne (Catherine Keener), who turns out to be the serpent in their garden, tempting her with something which is much more irresistible than a piece of fruit but which has definitely come straight off the tree of Forbidden Knowledge. And, like her namesake, Eva falls. Read more ..

Lawrence in Arabia is not a traditional biography of the enigmatic T. E. Lawrence; instead, the story of Lawrence’s exploits in Arabia is rendered in great detail by veteran war correspondent Scott Anderson, who proves to be an excellent storyteller. While the book concentrates upon Lawrence, Anderson also examines the impact of Western imperialism on the Middle East through German academic and diplomat Curt Pruűffer, American Standard Oil representative and later diplomat turned scholar William Yale, and Jewish agronomist and Zionist Aaron Aaronsohn. This biographical approach makes for interesting reading and also includes, among others, in-depth portraits of British diplomat Mark Sykes and Arab leader Emir Hussein and his son Faisal ibn Hussein.

But the core of the book remains Lawrence’s adventures in Arabia in which the British soldier often found himself in conflict with the policies of his government. The British in an effort to tie down Turkish troops encouraged an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The leader of this revolt was the respected religious figure Emir Hussein from Mecca, who was promised an Arab nation which would include Syria and Palestine.

Yet unknown to the Arabs, in 1916 the French and British negotiated the Sykes-Picot agreement which placed limitations upon any future Arab state by reserving Palestine and Iraq for the British, while the French, despite their lack of a significant military presence on the Middle Eastern front, were to be awarded the primary role in Syria and Lebanon. In addition, the 1917 Balfour Declaration committed the British to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In seeking to explain the double dealing of the European governments toward the Arabs, Anderson writes, “For many Europeans, steeped in the condescension of the late imperial age, independence didn’t mean letting native peoples actually govern themselves, but something far more paternalistic: a new round of the ‘white man’s burden,’ the tutoring -- and, of course, the exploiting -- of native peoples until they might sufficiently grasp the ways of modern civilization to stand on their own at some indeterminate point in the future” (183). Read more ..

Somebody had to write it, of course. In the event it turned out to be Christopher Orr of the Atlantic, though any number of critics these days might have done the same. Here’s the lead of Mr Orr’s piece about Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass’s true-life tale of piracy in the treacherous waters of the Arabian Sea off the coast of Somalia in 2009:

A tiny cohort of poorly organized insurgents, in a feat of terrible miscalculation, hijack an enterprise vastly larger than themselves, demanding a large and implausible ransom. Outnumbered and surrounded, they soon begin bickering with one another, their plans changing by the hour. Although repeatedly offered an out if they will simply release their hostage, they find themselves too deeply wedded to the self-destructive course they’ve charted. "I came too far," their leader explains. "I can’t give up." Is Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips the most inadvertently resonant movie of the year?

Oh, I get it. He means that those Wascally Wepublicans who are (or were when the piece appeared) brutalizing and holding hostage President Obama and his pathetic band of defenseless Democrats are just like the Somali pirates in Mr Greengrass’s film — except that the film feels a great deal more sympathy toward the gun-toting pirates than Mr Orr or his fellow partisans have shown any signs of toward the Republicans or tea-partiers. Here’s yet more redundant proof that movie criticism and left-wing idiocy go together like a horse and carriage. Or a vast container ship and piracy. Read more ..

New York Times bestselling author Edwin Black will be the featured speaker at the IBC-TV Special Event being hosted in the Beverly Hills City Council Chambers by the Beverly Hills Forum November 25, 2013. He will reveal new information from his latest investigative book, Financing the Flames: How Tax-Exempt and Public Money Fuel a Culture of Confrontation and Terror in Israel. The IBC-TV Special Event accompanies a special 10-part broadcast series on Financing the Flames produced as part of the Edwin Black Show on the IBC-TV network.

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Financing the Flames pulls the cover off the robust use of US tax-exempt, tax-subsidized, and public monies to foment agitation, systematically destabilize the Israel Defense Forces, and finance terrorists in Israel. In a far-flung investigation in the United States, Israel, and the West Bank, human-rights investigative reporter Edwin Black documents that it is actually the highly politicized human rights organizations and NGOs themselves—all American taxpayer supported—which are financing the flames that make peace in Israel difficult if not impossible.

Black spotlights key charitable organizations such as the Ford Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the New Israel Fund, and many others, as well as American taxpayers as a group. Instead of promoting peace and reconciliation between Arabs and Israelis, he writes, a variety of taxpayer-subsidized organizations have funded a culture where peace does not pay, but warfare and confrontation do.

Financing the Flames has received a cascade of accolades since it was unleashed upon the public last month. Rick Halperin director of Southern Methodist University Embrey Human Rights Program and former chairman of the board of Amnesty International USA called the book “a jolt.” Halperin wrote, “Most people should and will be appalled to read the revelations in Financing the Flames. It is a jolt!” Read more ..

It all began in June 2006 when a nineteen year old Israeli army conscript, Gilad Schalit, was kidnapped by Hamas loyalists -- “rogue groups” Gershon Baskin calls them -- in the continuing tit-for-tat violence between Israeli occupiers and occupied Palestinians. The Israelis have imprisoned thousands of Palestinians, some of whom committed heinous crimes and many others whose nonviolent challenges to their subjugators ended up in a prison cell, much to the dismay of their families and supporters. Schalit, nineteen, was only one Israeli Jew, but in Israel his capture was taken personally. To set the stage, Baskin tells us that one year earlier, his wife’s cousin was murdered in Ramallah by a Hamas member.

Enter Baskin, an American-Israeli, who has spent virtually his entire professional life in Israel working with other peaceniks for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, having co-founded with a Palestinian ally a public-policy think tank and where he now writes a column, “Encountering Peace” in the Jerusalem Post.

When he first heard of Schalit’s abduction he had what can best described as a revelation. He possessed one thing Israel’s spymasters and officials didn’t have, namely extensive contacts with Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza, which he had developed over the years in his peace work. Seated on the shores of the Dead Sea in neighboring Jordan, learning of the abduction, he reflected on the kidnapping’s possible consequences, asking himself, “How many innocent Israelis and Palestinians would be killed as a result of this attack?” -- retaliation being the name of the game. Read more ..

In The Blood Telegram, Gary J. Bass, a former journalist who is currently a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, describes the 1971 bloodbath which destroyed East Pakistan and gave birth to the nation of Bangladesh – a series of events which Bass argues culminated in “a forgotten genocide,” overshadowed by events in Vietnam and Cambodia along with the opening of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Bass asserts that the United States must bear responsibility for the Pakistani army’s violent response to calls for autonomy following the electoral victory of Mujib-ur-Rahman in East Pakistan.

The violence, which left at least a quarter million Bengalis dead and millions more refugees, was carried out with weapons supplied by the United States to its Pakistan military ally, while President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger refused to reign in their client General Ayha Muhammad Yahya Khan despite the fact that the U.S. consulate in Dacca provided detailed intelligence to the State Department and White House of the atrocities taking place in East Pakistan.

The chief protagonist of this story is career Foreign Service officer Archer Blood, who as head of the consulate at Dacca sacrificed his career to assure that the true story of the massacre in East Pakistan was communicated to Washington. Nixon and Kissinger were infuriated with the so-called “Blood Telegram,” and the career diplomat was recalled from his post. Bass also reserves praise for former New York Republican Senator Kenneth Keating, who served as Ambassador to India during the crisis and failed to share the animosities of Nixon and Kissinger toward Indian democracy. Read more ..

One of the major findings of Robert Putnam and David Campbell's important 2011 study American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us is the rise of what scholars of religion call "the nones": a rising tide of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which is now in the neighborhood of 20% of the U.S. population. Such a statistic is often cited as an example of how, amid the prominence and evident power of evangelical Christians in U.S. society (who, by the way, tend to see themselves as beleaguered), the nation is becoming increasingly secular. But in Families and Faith, sociologist Vern Bengtson and collaborators Norella Putney and Susan Harris report that the picture is somewhat more complicated. To be sure, they say, there has been significant churn in religious identity since 1970. But there's also been a lot more continuity than you might think.

Families and Faith is a brief distillation of The Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG), a 35-year project begun by Bengtson in 1970 drawing on over 2,000 respondents in over 350 multi-generational families. The goal of the study was to analyze patterns of religious transmission, or lack thereof, across four generations. In the broadest sense, what Bengtson found is that about six in ten children kept to the religious tradition of their parents -- more for Mormons and Jews, less for Catholics and mainline Protestants.

You can interpret that as a glass that's a little more than half full or almost half-empty, depending on your predilections. But Bergston leans toward the former, for a number of reasons. One is that many of those who have not maintained faith traditions in any formal sense nevertheless profess loyalty to them and eventually return to them (the so-called prodigals). Another is that non-religious affiliation is itself significantly a matter of generational transmission. Read more ..

“Financing the Flames” is very troubling, but then that’s nothing new for an Edwin Black book since all of his works studiously reveal facts and unknown information that shocks and disrupts historical conventions. What is different about this undertaking as compared to his previous treatises is that it deals with contemporary events, events that are literally ripped from today’s headlines. Financing the Flames exposes the greatest threat to Israel’s existence since 1948, but this time the threat may succeed – because it emanates from enemies within Israel and the Jewish world.

These enemies are borne from the almost innate, often misplaced, Jewish sense of responsibility for others (misplaced, since the frequent goal of the others is to destroy Judaism itself).

Over the last decade or so, a question has been repeatedly asked and debated: “Why is Israel so successful on the military battlefield yet so unsuccessful when it comes to winning the public relations war?” This question has been especially puzzling since there are so many Jews working in the news media. The mystery intensifies when one considers the extensive care taken by the Israelis to protect uninvolved civilians and not overreact to provocations, even severe ones.

Usually the answer revolves around the vast sums of money paid by oil-rich Arab nations to anti-Israel PR efforts. Unquestionably, this wealth of funds and the media’s never ending hunger to gobble it up has played a big part in unbalancing the field. However, as it turns out, there is more to the story.

In Financing the Flames, we finally get the real answer to the question, as Edwin Black meticulously details how anti-Israel efforts are being funded by non-Arab nations (such as the United States and Great Britain) and by presumably non-aligned, well-intentioned private donor groups – some Jewish, which are then implemented by misguided Jews and Jewish organizations. In other words, the Jewish gifts for socially-conscious fund raising and media wizardry, if indeed such things exist, are ironically being used against Israel. Read more ..

British crooner Sir Tom Jones condemned boycotts of Israel by musicians after playing two sold out shows in Tel Aviv last month, the UK Jewish News reported. “I was in Israel two weeks ago where a lot of singers won’t go (because of the boycott campaign). I don’t agree with that. I think entertainers should entertain. They should go wherever, there shouldn’t be any restrictions. That’s why I went there. I did two shows in Tel Aviv and it was fantastic,” he told the Jewish News.

In August, Israel’s Consul for Public Affairs in New York, Gil Lainer, said the Welsh singer had become “the latest victim of a fringe campaign pushing for a boycott of Israel, which bullies artists and academics from coming to Israel,” and encouraged Israel supporters to contact him via Twitter (@RealSirTomJones) with positive messages. Lainer credited the activism of online supporters of Israel as the reason why “artists like Alicia Keys stood up to online bullying, and had an amazing time in Israel this July in a pair of sold out shows.” Read more ..

Can anything new be written about Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Yes, most certainly.

Ever since I can remember, presidential candidates have called the upcoming vote “the most important election of our lives.” The phrase has become a staple of political rhetoric. In an extraordinary new book, Roosevelt’s Second Act: The Election of 1940 and the Politics of War, Richard Moe convincingly demonstrated why the contest that elected FDR to a third term might well have been the most important election in American history, rivaling that of 1864.

The author of several books, Moe served as Vice President Walter Mondale’s chief of staff and as a senior advisor to President Jimmy Carter and later served for 17 years as president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Moe’s government experience is a tremendous asset, as the author displays a highly sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the many forces at work behind the curtain in the Roosevelt Administration. He writes with real insight about the key players of the time, and helps the reader to understand the competing forces at play in the political process.

The 1940 campaign is fascinating on many levels, not least the fact that 1940 would be not only the first, but also the last time, due to the 22nd Amendment (proposed in 1947 and ratified in 1951), that a candidate would be nominated for a third term. Moe has chosen a truly unique moment in American history, one that will never be repeated again. Surprisingly, FDR’s decision is the subject of little scholarship.

Woven throughout is how Roosevelt kept one eye on developments overseas in Europe and the other on the 1940 election, and his commitment both to stopping the spread of fascism abroad and preserving his reform programs at home. Neither was a given. In fact, each of FDR’s desires faced tough odds: America did not have the military means to enforce the former, and a slew of conservative opposition among not only Republicans but also among Democrats threatened the legacy of the New Deal. Read more ..

A regular feature of West Bank confrontation between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians seems to be a corps of intrepid young women that villagers call “internationals.” They specialize in upfront and personal, in-your-face, and often nose-to-nose verbal taunting hoping to provoke a reaction that video cameras can record. If and when soldiers finally do react, these incidents are then uploaded to the Internet to prove “the brutality of the IDF.” These “internationals” often seem to appear out of nowhere at a village flashpoint. Just as suddenly, they melt into the background.

Using false names and seemingly untrackable movements, the skilled and stealthy internationals have managed to inspire and encourage videographed confrontation far beyond their numbers. Who are they? What is the font of their financial wherewithal? Who is financing these flames?

Searching for answers, one night in early May 2013, I traveled to the tiny West Bank town of Deir Itsiya where the internationals quietly maintain a base of operations. The women are known to many in that local Arab community, where they are provided logistical assistance and deferential hospitality. They receive many European guests. When I asked my taxi driver, "Do you know where the house is?" he answered, "Yes, Sheik Haider (neighborhood)." He took me there.

At an elbow in a dusty road, I found their compound behind long, ornate iron fencing. I knocked on all the doors, the ones with knockers and the ones without. No answer. I called out for anyone who was home. A neighbor strolled by to remark. The driver translated: "He said the European girls are not sleeping in town tonight. But he knows how to reach them. I will take you where he said." Read more ..

When at age 17 I decided not to eat meat or fish my alarmed mother asked our family doctor if I would die. Reassured I would live, I fed stray animals and birds and on occasional Saturdays visited the bookstore of Simon Gould, a Manhattan bookseller who had run for the presidency as a write-in candidate on a ticket called The Vegetarian Party. I doubt he received many votes but he was kind and once gave me a piece of advice. Best to remain a vegetarian for life for humane reasons, the better to resist future pressures to regress into eating meat. Health was important, but secondary to preserving all life.. He also presented  me with a book published in 1892,  Animal Rights, by  Henry Salt, a British  polymath.  Peter Singer, who wrote the indispensable Animal Liberation said it “remains among my most treasured books.”   The word vegetarian itself derives from the Latin “vigitore,” or “giving strength and health” but was more appropriately defined by the long-defunct American Vegetarian Society as  “a diet free of flesh products produced by violence and  suffering.”

Vegetarianism, once derided and ignored is now accepted by millions of Americans,  had its beginnings in Great Britain and  was brought to the United States by the Bible Christian Church. Because it is rarely scrutinized seriously by historians, Adam D. Shprintzen’s illuminating study, The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement 1817-1921 (University of North Carolina Press) is more than welcome because it tells its fascinating if often eccentric history in the context of momentous societal changes.

When the British-based Bible Christian Church members immigrated to Philadelphia in 1817 they came with the blessing of its founder William Cowherd, a good-looking Lancashire man and devotee of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish philosopher and theologian who preached the virtues of a meatless diet though there is some doubt that he was always faithful to the ideal. Cowherd remained behind in Britain but was said to have been the only man brave enough to read through the complete works of Swedenborg in Latin. Read more ..

On November 6, Taylor Swift became only the second person ever to be awarded the Country Music Association’s Pinnacle Award. That honor is given to an artist who’s achieved the highest degree of worldwide success and recognition. The other recipient?  Garth Brooks in 2005. The singer-songwriter recently opened the new Taylor Swift Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

When Swift was growing up, she took music classes at her school. But when she wanted to take more advanced lessons, her parents were able to provide them for her.

"A lot of my music education happened outside of school," she explained. "It happened because my parents were willing to drive me to countless children’s theater, local theater productions or take me to guitar lessons.” Swift has credited both her wide ranging musical education and being exposed to all kinds of music as a child as important to her development as a songwriter and performer. Read more ..

Financing the Flames could not have been written by any journalist other than Edwin Black—and even Black could not have written it 10 years ago. Ten years ago, this attempt would likely have seen him end up as just another casualty in the treacherously dangerous politics of the Middle East. However, Black's well-earned reputation as a tenacious and hard-hitting, but fair and accurate investigative author gave him the unique ability to obtain unprecedented access and cooperation from normally suspicious participants involved in a deadly political war.

At its core, Financing the Flames documents Black's attempt to bring sense to the apparent disconnect between the allegedly documented civil rights abuses by the Israeli Defense Forces on powerless Palestinians, and the Israelis, a people with a history of suffering great hardship, pain, and unspeakable acts at the hands of would-be exterminators. Black also harkens to a favorite exhortation of mine from Exodus 22: "Do not mistreat or oppress a stranger in your midst, for you were strangers in Egypt." In typical Black style, he went straight to the source, talking to the key players on both sides of the conflict, from the highest military authorities to the common factory worker and senior executives from human rights organizations. Black witnessed for himself the regular demonstrations that provide the fodder for many of the allegations, interviewing both Israelis and Palestinians in those conflicts, firsthand. From the finest hotels to the most dangerous bad alleys, Black brings the reader along.

Also typically, Black followed the money.

The result is a compelling and stunning exposé of how American taxpayers are literally financing the flames of confrontation in Israel, with U.S. tax-exempt organizations paying for training, participation, and organizing a dangerous street theater in the Middle East. Not only paying for it, but these “human-rights organizations” are providing the directors, the producers, the scripts, and the marketing campaigns. And yes, some of the actors are Americans and others from the Western world. Black even documents how these dramas become well-scheduled performances. Unfortunately, all the actors do not go out for a drink afterwards. Some are injured. Some die. Read more ..

Police are not generally known for their genteel manners and skill at creating metaphors.  But many cops, as  police officers are known, have written books influenced by their law enforcement work.  Still, you don't find many award-winning poets among them and not all that many females.  A woman in Houston, Texas has made her way both as a cop and a lyric poet.

Sarah Cortez draws a crowd to hear poems that touch on everything from sex, love and food to dating fellow police officers.

"Your first cop boyfriend, your first handgun.  No one else believed in your calling to wear a badge and police the streets," said Sarah Cortez. Sarah Cortez had her law-enforcement calling 20 years ago.  And she still works in uniform as a part-time reserve officer at the Harris County constable's precinct four office. Her experience as a cop is often reflected in her books of poetry and the anthologies she has edited. Read more ..

A group of Iraqi urban dancers is visiting major U.S. cities this month as part of a first-ever Iraqi hip hop diplomacy tour of the United States. The U.S. government-sponsored tour is the culmination of years of training inside Iraq, where the Kurdish and Arab dancers face tougher conditions to develop their skills than their American counterparts.

Husain Simko is one of the six Iraqi breakdancers bringing their interpretation of the American-originated art of hip hop to U.S. audiences. The tour already has taken them to the cities of Dearborn, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and ends in Boston on October 23-24. Twenty-year-old Husain, who is from the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil, showed off some impressive moves when the group performed at Washington D.C.'s Dance Place theater on Saturday.
 
Hip hop beginnings
 
Husain said he first discovered breakdance from U.S. soldiers stationed in Irbil in 2004.
 
"One of the soldiers, he was standing on the car - between all of the kids, he calls me, and says, 'come here, and do the wave move,'" he said. "And I was like, how did this [arm] bone go up?  It was something I didn't know about.  So I just went home and practiced and practiced until 2005," said Husain.
 
Husain joined fellow Kurdish hip hop enthusiast Shalaw in signing up for an Iraqi dance academy launched by U.S. non-profit group American Voices in 2007. Led by executive director John Ferguson, it is the only group coaching Iraq's aspiring hip hop artists. "We put them through a long series of auditions and chose six of the best and most dedicated and most talented dancers to participate in this tour to the United States," said Ferguson.  "It's the very first time any of them have been to America, and the very first time they've participated in a full-length hip hop dance show." Read more ..

In this first comprehensive survey of films about war in the post-Vietnam era, Patricia Keeton and Peter Scheckner identify a significant shift in Hollywood away from the celebration of military prowess and pseudo-democratic values.  No longer do films simply embrace the familiar combat stories of the “band of brothers” triumphing against arrogant and authoritarian enemies. American cinema instead has begun to treat war more critically, incorporating the perspectives of the poor and marginalized, who in the era of the volunteer army increasingly fight our wars of choice.  Since the strategic, political and social catastrophe of Vietnam, Keeton and Scheckner tell us, “American war cinema has changed, possibly forever, from mindless flag waving to juggling and making sense of a complex patchwork of social and political contradictions.”

Yet, as the authors also argue, Hollywood has hardly taken a radical left turn, especially when it comes to connecting foreign policy failures to the structural inequities of American empire building.  Although it has become “nearly impossible…not to see the worker behind the warrior” in American film narratives, Hollywood’s class perspective is still rather limited. No surprise.  Little has changed in the relationships of power and authority that, on the one hand, send working-class Americans to fight overseas and, on the other, control the production and distribution of the war films that show that fighting to the rest of us.

At best, contemporary films merely displace “class tensions and doubts about contemporary wars” onto stories of past conflicts or into futuristic narratives of interstellar strife.  Thus, Steven Spielberg can give a “nod to the worker behind the warrior” in a World War II flick like Saving Private Ryan (1998), but such class identities largely would be avoided in films about contemporary conflicts such as the war in Iraq.  Or James Cameron can pay tribute in Avatar (2009) to anti-imperialist rebellion, so long as it is by the inhabitants of a moon light-years distant.  Moreover, when Hollywood cinema of the post-Vietnam era occasionally questions the motives and competence of specific American foreign policies, as do films like The Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010) and Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999), it generally has avoided addressing the corporate empire-building that the authors argue lies behind the United States’ seemingly endless drive toward war.  Hollywood can indeed tolerate some level of dissent about the “military-industrial complex,” however it cannot see through mere political malfeasance (lying to the public about WMDs for instance) to the larger questions of who rules that system and why they need ordinary Americans to fight and die for it. Read more ..

I'm one of those people who was prompted to read this book after I saw, live, the author's interview on FOX News where his interlocutor insinuated that Aslan, as a Muslim, had ulterior motives in writing about Christianity other than that of a historian. (The anti-intellectual subtext was as strong as the implied invitation to religious bigotry). The exchange, which went viral, launched Zealot onto the New York Times bestseller list, something unlikely to have happened without out it, notwithstanding Aslan's previous well regarded book on Islam, No God but God. So it is that FOX demonstrates its perverse market power.

In terms of the book's argument, Zealot rests on a syllogism that goes something like this:

Jesus of Nazareth was born into a time and place of extraordinary political instability stemming from the seething religious and social tensions in Jewish Palestine.

After the death of Jesus, these tensions, which had periodically erupted into insurrection under Roman rule, finally provoked an overwhelming military response in 70 CE that discredited militant Judaism in the eyes of followers and outsiders alike.

Jesus therefore had to be sanded down for mass consumption, his sharp political edges softened as part of a larger process of transforming him from a Jewish messiah to a universal savior.

As Aslan acknowledges, calling Jesus a Zealot (capital Z) is anachronistic, a little like titling a biography of Abigail Adams Feminist. The Zealots as a discrete political faction only arose after the death of Jesus, and while there were people with that designation in his lifetime (lower-case z), he was not commonly associated with them. Aslan, however, feels that there's enough evidence of militancy in the gospels to suggest his affinity for them. Read more ..

Theater audiences first met the dysfunctional Wingfield family nearly 70 years ago in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.

His tale of heartbreak and faded dreams, inspired partly by the playwright's own family dynamics, has resonated powerfully with audiences through the decades.

The latest revival of this classic is on Broadway, where audiences enter the Booth Theater to find a simple, but striking vision.

Onstage, there’s the scantest representation of a cramped apartment, but there are no walls, just a sofa, dining room table and a couple of other pieces of furniture, with a long tilted fire escape reaching upward. Other than that, everything’s black. The whole set seems to be floating in a void.  Read more ..

After following Dan Moldea’s career for over thirty years I have concluded he is one of America's best investigative reporters. That judgment has not diminished after reading his memoirs Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer.

Throughout his books the old maxim, Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall is clearly evident. A specialist on organized-crime investigations since 1974, he has widened his brief to cover everything from Mafia hit men to political scandal. Working out of Washington DC, but at times living in cities across America during his periods of research, Moldea was on first name basis with beat cops and organized crime members, from corporate leaders to community activists. For his troubles he has escaped being killed six times.

Moldea’s highly acclaimed works investigating the power of the mafia include The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob (1978), Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (1986) and Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (1989).

Moldea also took it upon himself to investigate crimes which were either unsolved or the investigations created numerous unanswered questions. The resulting published works of these cases include The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity (1995); Evidence Dismissed: The Inside Story of the Police Investigation of O.J. Simpson (with Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter, 1997); and A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm (1998).

For his reporting Moldea has won acclaim from numerous newspapers and magazines including Newsweek and the New York Times. And for good reason. Some of his writing has altered history especially his work on the disappearance of Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa, the RFK assassination and the alleged ‘murder’ of Clinton White House aide Vince Foster. Read more ..

The 2010 drama "Fair Game," starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, catapulted the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame onto the silver screen.

Plame's life took an unexpected turn after having her cover blown by Bush administration officials, shortly after her husband, former U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson, refuted government claims that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was trying to buy enriched uranium from Niger.

Ten years after the scandal, Plame has returned to the world of espionage — this time as a novelist.

In a pop-cultural medium where female agents are often stereotyped as femme fatales, Plame says Vanessa Pierson, the main character of her new novel, "Blowback," is a woman trying to balance personal life with career, very much like herself. “They are either over sexualized, or [there is] heavy reliance on physicality, or they are victims," says Plame. "Or basically I think of them as paper dolls.” Read more ..

When Iran's President Hassan Rohani came home from his charm offensive in New York last month, he arrived bearing a "special gift" from the United States.

But any resulting goodwill may be short-lived, with art experts now saying the 2,700-year-old Persian artifact that was returned to the Iranian people is a fake. The piece, a silver chalice in the shape of a winged griffin, was thought to have originated from the Kalmakarra cave in western Iran and was estimated to be worth about $1 million.

U.S. Customs officials seized the artifact from an Iranian art dealer who was attempting to smuggle it into the country in 2003. The griffin sat in storage in a New York warehouse for more than a decade until Rohani's first presidential trip to the United Nations in September provided an opportunity for the United States to hand it over to Rohani's delegation. Read more ..

History is not destiny: this is the message of journalist Amanda Ripley in her foray into secondary education. We all know that the United States has been struggling comparatively in international rankings of academic performance as measured by standardized tests -- and has been for some time. Most of us are also aware that the reigning educational superpowers are Finland and South Korea. We tend to assume the reasons for a nation's place in the academic world are relatively static: material prosperity, cultural values, ethnic homogeneity (or lack thereof). But, Ripley argues, global performance has in fact been quite fluid. South Korea and Finland were educational backwaters until relatively recently -- as was Poland until even more recently. But, showing more confidence in the efficacy of government than Americans have been able to do, each of these nations has taken proactive steps that have made a difference (even as other nations, among them Italy and Norway, have slipped, for some of the same reasons the U.S. has lagged).

Ripley rests her case on two foundations. The first is empirical: her standard of measurement is the Program for International Assessment Exam (PISA), a standardized test developed at the turn of this century by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an NGO based in Paris. Though PISA is subject to the same skepticism and limits of many standardized tests, it is more analytical and real-world based than most, particularly those administered in the United States. But the bulk of Ripley's analysis is anecdotal: she follows three American students as they journey to rural Finland, urban South Korea, and western Poland, contextualizing accounts of their experiences with thick descriptions of the political, social, and cultural milieu in each. Read more ..

U.S. comedians on late night TV love to make fun of American politicians, whose feuds often paralyze national decision-making. When the disputes led to the federal government's shutdown this week, the jokes went into overdrive.

The government shutdown has given some of America's most popular TV comedians new ammunition against one of their favorite targets: Republicans.

In a YouTube clip posted by Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the host pounces on Republican lawmaker Todd Rokita for opposing President Obama's health care law. "I just want to help the American people get by and through what is one of the most insidious laws ever created by man. And that is Obamacare," said Rokita in the clip.

"Not just one of the most insidious laws ever created by America, which has Jim Crow and slavery on its resume of laws, but by man - putting Obamacare up with the Nuremberg laws, the Spanish inquisition and 'prima nocta' - the medieval law where on your wedding night the king gets to sleep with your wife," ridiculed Stewart. Read more ..

As world leaders at the United Nations try to resolve Syria's civil war, a little further uptown international preservationists came together at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in a bid to protect Syrian culture.

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art draws millions of people each year to see its unparalleled collections, but on Tuesday art enthusiasts turned into activists pleading for the protection of Syria's historical artifacts.

“There should not be a choice between saving lives and saving heritage,” said Irina Bokova, the director general of UNESCO. More than two years of fighting in Syria has left more than 100,000 people dead. The violence has also left Syrians powerless to prevent the destruction of some of their most ancient and cherished sites. Read more ..

Since the 1930s scholars, scientists, journalists and ordinary folk have wondered why the Nazis could have committed so many ghastly crimes against innocent people and children. At times a few helpful insights arise from the killers themselves. One that comes to mind emerges from Gitta Sereny’s mesmerizing interviews with Franz Stangl, the Treblinka and Sobibor commandant, in her 1974 book Into That Darkness. Stangl was responsible for 900,000 deaths. Sereny came away thinking of him as a run of the mill bureaucratic careerist who saw victims as “cargo,” while doing personally fulfilling work that brought him prestige and promotions. After Germany’s defeat he escaped to Brazil where he was caught in 1967, extradited to West Germany, given a life sentence, and finally died of a heart attack in 19i71.

More recently, Thomas Harding’s impressive Hanns and Rudolf deals withAuschwitz commandant Rudolph Hoess [spelled Hoss with an umlaut in German]. When tried for his crimes he told the court that he and others like him were not merely following orders, as most captured Nazis claimed, but instead their initiative was highly valued by their superiors and, he chillingly continued, he and his colleagues took great pride in their work. He was hung on the grounds of Auschwitz.

Jack El-Hai, who wrote the well-received The Lobotomist, offers yet another perspective in this forceful and absorbing book, The Nazi and The Psychiatrist: Hermann Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fateful Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII (PublicAffairs).

To find out if fifty-two elite imprisoned Nazi prisoners were fit for trial as war criminals, the U.S. Army assigned Capt. Douglas M. Kelley, a psychiatrist, to examine the prisoners, a posting he came to view as an extraordinary gift as he developed professional relationships with a few, but especially with Hermann Goering [spelled Goring with an umlaut in German], Reichmarschall, Luftwaffe chief and number three in Hitler’s circle. Among the more prominent Nazis held were Hans Frank, governor-general of Poland; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy Fuhrer who had flown to England in May 1941 in a quixotic effort to being “peace” between the two nations; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, SS; Robert Ley, who ran labor affair; Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister; Julius Streicher, editor of the pornographic anti-Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer; Arthur Rosenberg, the party’s racial “philosopher”; Generals Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel; and Wilhelm Frick, Goebbels’ man. Read more ..

Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity is a psychological drama with stunning visuals. After a space mission goes awry, scientist Ryan Stone drifts into the cold black void, her chances of returning to earth are bleak. A simple story of loss and survival, Gravity unravels hundreds of miles above the earth while the film’s Hubble-like imagery reveals both the beauty and the harshness of deep space.

In the film, the astronauts are warned of debris from a destroyed Russian satellite. Senior astronaut Matt Kowalski, played by George Clooney, warns mission specialist Dr. Ryan Stone of the danger. But Ryan, played by Sandra Bullock, is on her first mission and doesn't see the danger until it is too late.Kowalski attempts to retrieve the drifting astronaut. 

Director Alfonso Cuaron creates a visceral 3D experience of a space mission disaster, where the romantic quiet void turns terrifying and astronauts literally spin out of control. Cuaron wanted to make the intricately technical images as accurate as possible.

"With Emmanuel Lubezki, chief cinematographer, the attempt was to do something that look like an IMAX documentary," Cuaron said. "Also we wanted to do something that honors the laws of physics in space in terms of the microgravity and the no resistance."

The actors also had to deal with the laws of physics, especially Bullock, who almost single handedly carries the movie. "Everything you see, we physically shot, even if it was in tiny pieces to string together," Bullock said. She said evoking the emotions of a lost woman inside a space suit was even more difficult. "You have to have that inner emotional life going at all times," she said. "If it is not alive and it is not there, you can see it on the eyes."  Read more ..

Even as The New York Times reported on a new survey showing once again that American Jews are disassociating from Judaism at a rapid pace, a Broadway musical was celebrating the life of a man who knew how to reach out to the unaffiliated and help them find their way back. The performance ended with an audience of about 900 people all singing Am Yisrael Chai with great glee.

The NYTimes article was based on a new Pew Research Center survey, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” that sought to understand everything of consequence about American Jewish life, from birthrate trends, to core beliefs, to religious affiliations, to cultural identity. The survey’s results were alarming, but by no means surprising. Its principal finding — that there is a disquietingly large rate of Jews who are growing up in America more assimilated and less affiliated, with many professing no belief at all — merely confirms trends we have been seeing for over three decades. There are few exceptions to the trend, and every stream of Judaism appears to share its impact. Read more ..

What happens when hip-hop meets an ancient Southeast Asian poetry tradition in the American Midwest? Answer: an unusual collaboration between a young rapper and his grandmother.

The American immigrant story usually follows some basic contours. The first generation holds on tight to their old world traditions. Their children try as hard as they possibly can to become “American.” Then in the third generation, the grandchildren often turn back to learn from their grandparents’ culture.

At an outdoor farmer’s market in St. Paul, Minnesota, an elderly woman chants in the dialect of the Hmong people of Laos.  She’s wearing a bright purple turban, a black dress with colorful appliques, a bright, shiny necklace and wrap-around sunglasses.  Next to her is a young man, dressed in black with a baseball cap and jacket. Read more ..

If one asks male queers today who wrote the first serious modern American novel that was explicitly gay, nine out of 10 would answer Gore Vidal, for his 1948 book “The City and the Pillar.” But they’d be wrong.

That distinction belongs to John Horne Burns, whose 1947 “The Gallery,” based on his wartime service in North Africa and Italy, garnered almost universal rave reviews, becoming a bestseller that immediately went through 12 printings. The novel nearly won the Pulitzer Prize for its hitherto unknown 31-year-old author, who became a literary celebrity overnight.

Burns’ portrait was featured on the cover of the influential Saturday Review of Literature as “the best war novelist of 1947,” and he was the first author to be praised simultaneously by Harper’s magazine and Harper’s Bazaar, the latter running a “romantic photograph of Burns taken on a gritty New York street” when it listed him as one of 1947’s “Men of the Moment” — along with David Lean, Robert Ryan, Michael Redgrave, and Stephen Spender .John Horne Burns, America’s “best war novelist,” done in by homophobia and his own success.

When Life magazine did a feature that year on the new generation of novelists to come out of World War II and assembled a half dozen of them for a group photograph, Burns was given pride of place at the front, with writers now better remembered than he in the background. Gore Vidal, whose World War II novel ”Williwaw” — a critically acclaimed little jewel about his war service in the Aleutians written when he was only 19 — was published the year before, but he was not included in the Life group of war writers.

Yet today, Burns is almost forgotten, even by cultivated gay writers. The talented Christopher Bram (author of the novel “The Father of Frankenstein,” which became the Oscar-winning gay cult film “Gods and Monsters”), in his otherwise useful book “Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America,” published in 2012, accords Burns and “The Gallery” only a dismissive half-sentence. Read more ..

This week, marking what would have been Ray Charles 83rd birthday, the U.S. Postal Service honored the singer with a new postage stamp. And, there’s also a new CD and DVD collection featuring great Ray Charles performances.

“Ray Charles Forever” opens with a newly remastered version of fellow piano man Leon Russell’s “A Song For You.”  It's one of a dozen tunes on the CD in the collection. President of the Ray Charles Foundation Valerie Ervin says that while fans of the singer and pianist may already have most of this music, there are extras that make this set special. 

“We released some DVD footage, some of that has never been seen or put out in many, many years," she said. "Some of it was shot over in Europe, it was a live show, so we are releasing that to DVD. That will be bonus footage for everyone to enjoy. And a lot of the tracks were remastered, so the sound comes up to today’s quality of sound, if you will.” Read more ..

Luc Besson made a couple of pretty good or at least pretty interesting movies twenty years or so ago. They were La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional. You could look them up on Netflix. But, since then, whatever tether to reality those movies still had has disappeared, and M. Besson has become just another Hollywood fantasist — one belonging to the Quentin Tarantino school which regards violence as "the funnest thing you can do at the movies." If you were to point out to either man that, in real life, violence isn’t fun at all, let alone the funnest thing you can do, he would doubtless reply, "So what? What have movies got to do with real life?" There’s no answer to that except that the question is disingenuous. Movies must reflect reality if only to the extent that they avoid it. In the case of Mr. Besson’s latest film, The Family, I wonder if what is reflected isn’t a cultural turn away from Enlightenment principles towards something more primitive.

It stars Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer as a mafia don and his wife in hiding in the fictional village of Cholong-sur-Avre in Normandy — are people in the witness protection program really settled in foreign countries? — along with their two children (Dianna Agron and John D’Leo) after he rats on one or more of his former colleagues. These notably include one Don Luchese (Stan Carp), who directs from his prison cell the indefatigable efforts of DiCicco (Jimmy Palumbo) to see that he and the family get what the Mafia thinks they deserve. Just so that we are left in no doubt about what that is, the film begins with graphic images of DiCicco’s murder of an entire family as they sit at their dinner table — perhaps because he mistakes them for "Fred Blake" (as Mr. DeNiro, the former Giovanni Manzoni, is now known) and his family — before chopping off a finger of the dead paterfamilias for submission to Don Luchese. Read more ..

One way to undermine your credibility in any argument about Latin American politics is to allude to secret operations involving the CIA; do so and you can come off sounding like Dennis Hopper spinning into one of his out of orbit rants in Apocalypse Now. Fortunately, there is a highly credible source of information on the CIA: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, published in 2007 by New York Times reporter Tim Weiner, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the CIA.

The book, now available on Kindle, is a first-rate piece of scholarship. Exhaustively researched, Weiner pored through countless declassified documents and interviewed dozens of former CIA employees, including ten former directors. Powerful and convincing, Legacy of Ashes has earned high praise, including a National Book Award.

The idea for a Central Intelligence Agency grew out of the failings of the previous U.S. spy organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the intelligence service widely operational during World War II. The OSS bungled its way through the war, its multiple mistakes leading to the death of many of its often-youthful agents. After the war the OSS was dissolved, but many of the former officers engineered a soft landing for themselves by pushing for the creation of a permanent replacement intelligence service, one that would employ them. President Harry S Truman agreed, and in 1947 signed The National Security Act which founded the CIA. Still, the CIA needed an enemy, and shortly came to find one in the perceived threat of international communism. As the Cold War grew more bitter, the CIA gained added authority and a much larger, and secret, budget. Read more ..

A good painter uses simple strokes of a brush to bring texture, contrast and depth to a blank canvas. In comparison, computer programs can have difficulty reproducing the complex and varied forms of brushstrokes, and often require painstaking effort to mimic a brief sweep of paint.

Now, a team of researchers including scientists at Princeton University has developed a program that allows graphic artists to quickly and easily produce realistic brushstrokes on their computers. Called RealBrush, the program combines graphics algorithms with "Big Data" storage and retrieval techniques to allow computer artists to create, bend and shape a wide array of brushstrokes. Besides creating the strokes, the program allows for effects including smudging, smearing and merging of different types of media. Read more ..