Pantheon Books

Artist Patricia Kambitsch has created this awesome cartoon that condenses “all 318 pages of The Righteous Mind.” (We still think you should read the book though!) [via The Righteous Mind]

“This year, we celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month, and we’re also commemorating an important anniversary.  One hundred-fifty years ago, General Ulysses Grant issued an order – known as General Orders Number 11 – that would have expelled Jews, ‘as a class,’ from what was then known as the military Department of the Tennessee.  It was wrong.  Even if it was 1862, even if official acts of anti-Semitism were all too common around the world, it was wrong and indicative of an ugly strain of thought.

But what happened next could have only taken place in America. Groups of American Jews protested General Grant’s decision.  A Jewish merchant from Kentucky traveled here, to the White House, and met with President Lincoln in person.  After their meeting, President Lincoln revoked the order - one more reason why we like President Lincoln.

And to General Grant’s credit, he recognized that he had made a serious mistake.  So later in his life, he apologized for this order, and as President, he went out of his way to appoint Jews to public office and to condemn the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe.

Like so many groups, Jews have had to fight for their piece of the American dream.  But this country holds a special promise:  that if we stand up for the traditions we believe in and the values we share, then our wrongs can be made right, our union can be made more perfect, and our world can be repaired.”

- President Barack Obama, commemorating Jewish American Heritage Month on 5/30/12. Watch the full speech here, and read more about General Orders Number 11 in When General Grant Expelled the Jews by Jonathan D. Sarna, out now from Schocken Books.

On my early visits to China in the mid-1980s, I assumed that as a Western journalist I would be noticed, followed, surveilled — and I was. Most of the time today, however, foreigners are noticed only to the extent that they provide an opportunity for, or create an obstacle to, a business deal some Chinese dreamer has in his or her sights.

These are the successes. Some of the limits and failures are well publicized: among others, the environmental despoliation that has made cancer the leading cause of death in China; the demographic shift caused by the one-child policy that threatens to make China the first society to grow old before it grows rich; and the problems of transparency and accountability in the Chinese governing system, illustrated most recently by the Bo Xilai and Chen Guangcheng cases.

Those, at least, are the problems that get the headlines. But there’s a bigger one, which the Chinese government and public are only now starting to recognize: whether the success of China’s current model is leading toward a “low-wage trap,” in which its outsourcing factories get bigger but don’t necessarily move the country toward the higher tiers of the world economic structure.

Put differently, will Chinese companies ever go from assembling iPads to fostering future Apples of their own — or, similarly, from selling knockoff copies of Western movies, music, search engines and online apps to establishing China’s own pop-culture industries with worldwide profits and soft-power appeal?

via The New York Times, “Can China Escape the Low-Wage Trap?” by James Fallows, author of China Airborne.

Thanks to the eagle eyes at Slate for spotting this gem - “Tucked right between The Age of Lincoln and a history of Goldman Sachs [on Newt Gingrich’s bookshelf] is House of Leaves […] There is a statement to be made about this plot and about Gingrich’s very, very, very deliberate decision to wind down his campaign. Possibly. It could be that he just likes postmodern fiction more than he lets on.” (via Slate)

During the 2000 United States presidential election the campaign of candidate George Bush ran a negative ad aimed at his opponent, Al Gore, in which the word RATS was flashed in large white letters for a small fraction of a second.  That a word seen too briefly to be consciously perceived can influence your behavior was first proposed by an advertising expert named James Vicary in 1956. According to media accounts of the day, Vicary conducted a peculiar study on moviegoers who had come to see the film “Picnic” at a theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Unbeknownst to the audience, as they were watching, the words “drink Coca-Cola” and “eat popcorn” flashed briefly on screen every five seconds. Though the duration of each flash was too short for anyone to consciously detect, Vicary claimed that this subliminal exposure boosted Coke sales by 18 percent, andpopcorn sales by 58 percent.  Vicary’s claim came just after the Korean War, an era in which ideas like mind control and brainwashing had found a place in the public consciousness. Cautionary novels such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate suggested that, at the flick of some internal switch of the mind, fictionalpeople could be turned from happy citizens who coach little league games and bake apple pies to emotionless zombies and dangerous assassins. Was it possible that Vicary’s less ambitious manipulation actually could compel real-life people to spend more on sugary drinks?
 
The press, always thirsty for a sensational story, loved Vicary’s. But advertisers, the FCC, and research psychologists were skeptical. Vicary finally admitted in 1962 that he had never conducted the subliminal “experiment”—it was all a hoax he concocted in order to attract customers to his failing marketing business. Bush’s campaign had apparently not heard about the retraction—they ran his ad about 4000 times before it was found out and pulled due to protests.

- from Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow

(Watch the full campaign video here.)

Minister Louis Farrakhan with Arthur Goldwag’s The New Hate. (via Arthur Goldwag)

“For politicians, conspiracy theory provides both a ready-made rallying cry (I know who’s responsible for your misery; follow me and we will bring them to grief) and an all-purpose escape hatch (how can we possibly prevail against an enemy that’s so elusive and powerful?). Cult leaders, dictators, and demagogues are all avid promoters of conspiracy theories—nothing fosters dependency on a leader and solidarity among followers like the threat of persecution.” 

Arthur Goldwag, author of The New Hate, excerpted in The Atlantic: “McCarthy, Beck, and the New Hate”