In December 2009, Michael Lindenberger wrote “Obama's Afghanistan decision evokes LBJ's 1965 order on Vietnam buildup” for The Dallas Morning News. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson took ownership of a war he, like Obama, had inherited. Gen. William Westmoreland wanted more troops in Vietnam, and after a protracted debate within the White House, Johnson sent them. Over the next three years, he would send hundreds of thousands more and launch a carpet-bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Johnson's presidency – and many argue, Johnson himself – were destroyed long before America could finally, 10 years later, quit Vietnam. Obama's decision to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan has reawakened those memories of Vietnam's early days, and brought unsettling comparisons from an array of historians who have spent their careers studying Johnson. "I'll tell you, the more that I stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, the more I think of it, I don't know – it looks like to me we're getting into another Korea," Johnson said in 1964 during a tape-recorded conversation with national security adviser McGeorge Bundy. "It just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of it, once we're committed." McGovern, who campaigned hard for Johnson, said he had expected Johnson to pull back after gaining the presidency in his own right in 1964.
“I think this is a dreadful mistake on President Obama's part. It makes me sad. I am for him. I worked for him, and I still think he is a brilliant man. But it looks to me like Vietnam all over again.”
- Senator George McGovern, 2009
In September 2010, Peter Baker wrote “Woodward Book Says Afghanistan Divided White House” for The New York Times. Some of the critical players in President Obama’s national security team doubt his strategy in Afghanistan will succeed and have spent much of the last 20 months quarreling with one another over policy, personalities and turf, according to the new Bob Woodward book. The book, “Obama's Wars,” by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama’s top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work.
“I have to say that. I can’t let this be a war without end, and I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”
- President Barack Obama to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, when asked about whether or not his deadline to withdraw was “firm”
“This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan. Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room.”
- Barack Obama, telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation
In September 2010, Steve Luxenberg wrote “Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war” for the Washington Post. President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward. Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page "terms sheet" that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in "Obama's Wars," to be released on Monday. According to Woodward's meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.
“It got to the point in the spring, after a top-secret update to the president in the Situation Room at the White House, the president left the meeting and told his aides: What makes us think that given the description of the problem, that we're going to design a solution to this?”
In January 2011, Janet Maslin wrote “But Will It All Make ‘Tiger Mom’ Happy?” for The New York Times. “There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids’ true interests,” Amy Chua writes. She ought to know, because hers is the big one: “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a diabolically well-packaged, highly readable screed ostensibly about the art of obsessive parenting. In truth, Ms. Chua’s memoir is about one little narcissist’s book-length search for happiness. And for all its quotable outbursts from Mama Grisly (the nickname was inevitable), it will gratify the same people who made a hit out of the granola-hearted “Eat, Pray, Love.” You might wonder how this is possible. In “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert presented herself as a seeker of solace, whereas Ms. Chua eagerly overacts the role of wicked witch. The litany of her outrages has made her an instant conversation piece. What kind of mother throws her 3-year-old out in the cold? (“You can’t stay in the house if you don’t listen to Mommy.”) Or complains that her family’s pet rabbits aren’t smart enough? (“They were unintelligent and not at all what they claimed to be.”) Or, most memorably, makes her two daughters’ music lessons so grueling that one girl leaves tooth marks on the piano?
“In Disney movies, the [studious kid] always has to have a breakdown and realize that life is not all about following rules and winning prizes, and then take off her clothes and run into the ocean or something like that. But that's just Disney's way of appealing to all the people who never win any prizes. Winning prizes gives you opportunities, and that's freedom - not running into the ocean.”
“Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable — even legally actionable — to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty — lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. ... Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.”
In January 2011, Maureen Corrigan wrote “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” for NPR. Amy Chua may well be nuts. What kind of a mother hauls her then-7-year-old daughter's dollhouse out to the car and tells the kid that the dollhouse is going to be donated to the Salvation Army piece by piece if the daughter doesn't master a difficult piano composition by the next day? What kind of a mother informs her daughter that she's "garbage"? And what kind of mother believes, as Amy Chua tells readers she does, that: "an A- is a bad grade; ... the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and ... that medal must be gold"? What kind of a mother? Why, a mother who's raising her kids the Chinese, rather than the Western, way. In her new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua recounts her adventures in Chinese parenting, and — nuts though she may be — she's also mesmerizing. Chua's voice is that of a jovial, erudite serial killer — think Hannibal Lecter — who's explaining how he's going to fillet his next victim, as though it's the most self-evidently normal behavior. That's the other gripping aspect of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: There's method to Amy Chua's madness — enough method to stir up self-doubt in readers who subscribe to more nurturing parenting styles. Trust me, Battle Hymn is going to be a book club and parenting blog phenomenon; there will be fevered debate over Chua's tough love strategies, which include ironclad bans on such Western indulgences as sleepovers, play dates, and any extracurricular activities except practicing musical instruments ... which must be the violin or piano. Listen to the podcast of that episode of NPR's Fresh Air about the Amy Chua book, here.
The MMR vaccine controversy refers to claims that autism spectrum disorders are a direct result to having the MMR vaccine administered. MMR is an immunization against measles, mumps and rubella. Claims of a connection between the vaccine and autism surfaced in a 1998 paper, The Lancet, a respected British medical journal. Investigation by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer discovered that the lead author of the article, Andrew Wakefield, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and had broken other ethical guidelines and codes. The Lancet retracted the, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010, and was struck off the Medical Register—meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor in the United Kingdom. In 2011, media circulated the news that the BMJ had declared the research about the MMR link to autism “fraudulent.”
"This type of cognitive relativism — or "truthiness," as fictional talk show host Stephen Colbert termed it — has become the defining intellectual trend of our time."
"It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all of the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts."
- Seth Mnookin; April 2010, Larry King Live
"Looking at the diseases mumps, measles and rubella in a country like the US... it doesn't tend to be a problem. Children will do fine with these diseases in a developed country that has good nutrition. And because I live in a country where the norm is vaccine, I can delay my vaccines."
- Mother of a grade-schooler that was infected while on vacation in Europe
“By 2005 … a preoccupation with vaccine safety and an opposition to traditional institutions were viewed by an ever-growing number of ‘autism advocates’ as prerequisites for membership in their community.”
In January 2011, David M. Shribman wrote “Anatomy of a panic” for the Boston Globe. In the past decade Seth Mnookin has become a chronicler of some of the icons of American popular culture. He wrote a popular book, Feeding the Monster,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, Hard News, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "The Panic Virus"is sure to attract attention — and the virulent criticism of one of contemporary life’s most ardent insurgencies, those who believe inoculations possess the power to injure. Specifically the Seth Mnookin book focuses on the scare triggered by a flawed 1998 scientific paper suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could cause autism. […] In his book, Seth Mnookin traces the spread of the panic and the role of the media in it. A new parent himself, Mnookin admits a certain fear of vaccines — but an even greater fear that his child might encounter someone with measles or whooping cough before he gets all his shots. He understands the panic and passion of parents with sick children — but fears that waves of “self-righteous hysteria’’ have the power of overcoming “critical thinking.’’ […] The Seth Mnookin book is an unsparing brief against the vaccine skeptics. But in a larger sense, this volume is less about the insurrection against inoculations than it is about the democratization of information. It is less about the movement to battle the medical establishment than it is about the ability of social networks to mobilize for what Seth Mnookin and most mainstream scientists and doctors believe is a bad cause.
"That MMR paper is the best example there has ever been of a very, very dodgy paper that has created a lot of discomfort and misery."
- Dr Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, speaking about Dr. Andrew Wakefield's MMR-autism research
"Anxiety about the individual's fate in industrialized societies [plays a role in motivating anti-vaccination crusaders]. Then, as now, they appealed to knee-jerk populism by conjuring up an imaginary elite with an insatiable hunger for control. [...] Then, as now, they preached the superiority of subjective beliefs over objective proofs, of knowledge acquired by personal experience rather than through scientific rigor."
January 2011: Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic Magazine and author of the forthcoming book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "The Panic Virus" is a lesson on how fear hijacks reason and emotion trumps logic. But the story starts with a bit of bad science. On Feb. 26, 1998, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a paper by a medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield who claimed that he had found a causal link between autism and the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. Even though the journal's editors made it clear that further research was needed, at a press conference Dr. Wakefield announced: "With the debate over MMR that has started, I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together." […] In a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing, Seth Mnookin explains precisely how medical researchers set about determining whether there is a causal connection in an apparent pattern. "Broadly speaking, there are three ways scientists collect data to test new theories," he explains. "The best possible method is through a randomized clinical trial, in which researchers take a sampling of a population and arbitrarily test their hypothesis on one half while leaving the other half untouched."
From the website of the James Randi Educational Foundation, dated April 1, 2009: Jenny McCarthy is well known as a model and actor, but in recent days she's getting far more publicity for her stance that vaccines cause autism. She has a son who may be autistic, and of course we are sympathetic to her plight. But that can only go so far when Ms. McCarthy appears on endless chat shows, is interviewed in magazine articles, and even writes books encouraging people not to vaccinate their children. Numerous, well-done studies have shown conclusively that there is no causal link between vaccines and the onset of autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) - the claim that they are connected is spurious, based on anecdotes and the fact that vaccines are given to children around the same time that ASD symptoms begin to appear. The antivaccination movement has been directly linked with outbreaks of various vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, and there have been numerous illnesses and even deaths associated with these outbreaks. The facts are in, and have been for quite some time: vaccines are an overwhelming modern medical success story, having eradicated such scourges as smallpox, and hugely lowering rates of other diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio, influenza, and diptheria. The evidence is also overwhelmingly against any link between vaccines and autism as well. Yet all that evidence has been overturned in the public's mind with ease and alacrity by Ms. McCarthy, so she wins the Pigasus award for her contribution to the country's ill-health.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) is a 2005 non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book has been described as melding pop culture with economics, but has also been decried as "amateur sociology." By late 2009, it had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. The book is a collection of 'economic' articles written by Levitt, an expert who has already gained a reputation for applying economic theory to diverse subjects not usually covered by "traditional" economists; he does, however, accept the standard neoclassical microeconomic model of rational utility-maximization. In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner argue that economics is, at root, the study of incentives.
One example of the Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner's use of economic theory in Freakonomics involves demonstrating the existence of cheating among sumo wrestlers. In a sumo tournament, all wrestlers in the top division compete in 15 matches and face demotion if they do not win at least eight of them. The sumo community is very close-knit, and the wrestlers at the top levels tend to know each other well. The authors looked at the final match, and considered the case of a wrestler with seven wins, seven losses, and one fight to go, fighting against an 8-6 wrestler. Statistically, the 7-7 wrestler should have a slightly below even chance, since the 8-6 wrestler is slightly better. However, the 7-7 wrestler actually wins around 80% of the time. Levitt uses this statistic and other data gleaned from sumo wrestling matches, along with the effect that allegations of corruption have on match results, to conclude that those who already have 8 wins collude with those who are 7-7 and let them win, since they have already secured their position for the following tournament. The authors attempt to demonstrate the power of data mining. Many of their results emerge from Levitt's analysis of various databases, and asking the right questions. Authors posit that various incentives encourage teachers to cheat by assisting their students with multiple-choice high-stakes tests. Such cheating in the Chicago school system is inferred from detailed analysis of students' answers to multiple choice questions. But first Levitt asks, "What would the pattern of answers look like if the teacher cheated?" The simple answer: difficult questions at the end of a section will be more correct than easy ones at the beginning.
Reappraisals: In Chapter 2 of Freakonomics, the authors wrote of their visit to folklorist Stetson Kennedy's Florida home where the topic of Kennedy's investigations of the Ku Klux Klan were discussed. However, in their January 8, 2006 column in the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt wrote of questions about Stetson Kennedy's research ("Hoodwinked" pp 26-28) leading to the conclusion that Kennedy's research was at times embellished for effectiveness. In the "Revised and Expanded Edition" this embellishment was noted and corrected: "Several months after Freakonomics was first published, it was brought to our attention that this man's portrayal of his crusade, and various other Klan matters, was considerably overstated....we felt it was important to set straight the historical record."
Criticism: Freakonomics has been criticised for being a work of sociology and criminology, rather than economics. Israeli economist Ariel Rubinstein criticised the book for making use of dubious statistics and complained that "economists like Levitt ... have swaggered off into other fields", saying that the "connection to economics ... [is] none" and that the book is an example of "academic imperialism". Arnold Kling has suggested the book is an example of "amateur sociology".
Publishing history: Freakonomics peaked at number two among nonfiction on The New York Times Best Seller list and was named the 2006 Book Sense Book of the Year in the Adult Nonfiction category. The book received positive reviews from critics. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 67 out of 100, based on 16 reviews. The success of the book has been partly attributed to the blogosphere. In the campaign prior to the release of the book in April 2005, the publisher (William Morrow and Company) chose to target bloggers in an unusually strategical way, sending galley copies to over a hundred of them, as well as contracting two specialized word of mouth (buzz marketing) agencies. In 2006, the Revised and Expanded Edition of the book was published, with the most significant corrections in the second chapter.
Freakonomics blog: The authors started their own Freakonomics blog, which is "meant to keep the conversation going", in 2005. In May 2007, writer and blogger Melissa Lafsky was hired as the full time editor of the site. In August 2007, the blog was incorporated into The New York Times' web site – the authors had been writing joint columns for The New York Times Magazine since 2004 – and the domain Freakonomics.com became a redirect there. In March 2008, Annika Mengisen replaced Lafsky as the blog editor. Among the recurrent guest bloggers on the Freakonomics blog are Ian Ayres, Daniel Hamermesh, Eric A. Morris, Sudhir Venkatesh, Justin Wolfers and others.
Film adaptation: In 2010, Chad Troutwine, Chris Romano, and Dan O'Meara produced a documentary film adaptation with a budget of nearly $3 million in an omnibus format by directors Seth Gordon, Morgan Spurlock, Alex Gibney, Eugene Jarecki, Rachel Grady, and Heidi Ewing. It was the Closing Night Gala premiere film at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 30, 2010. It was also the Opening Night film at the AFI/Discovery SilverDocs film festival on June 21, 2010. Magnolia Pictures has acquired distribution rights for a Fall 2010 release.
In the interview and article for the Atlantic monthly magazine, "The Fires This Time: Joe Flood on Managing New York City" Joe Flood said this: One of the big appeals of using numbers to understand complex problems is getting counterintuitive results, which by definition go against common sense. After all, why spend all the time and money on a study that will only tell you what you already suspected? And we love surprising, counterintuitive takes on the world--it's one of the reasons we like reading Freakonomics, or Malcolm Gladwell's work or Michael Lewis' Moneyball, where the numbers reveal that the chubby guy who strikes out a lot is actually incredibly valuable to a baseball team. Those are the kind of results the city hired RAND to produce, and that's what they got. According to the models, they could close busy fire companies in fire-prone areas without much impact on overall service. For the city, that meant saving money, focusing budget cuts in politically weak areas and supposedly not losing much fire protection. That was exactly what everyone wanted to hear, and they ran with it. It just happened to be wrong. It wasn't the first time it had happened and certainly wasn't the last. Think of Robert McNamara's Pentagon during Vietnam, or Wall Street computer models alchemy that turned no-money-down mortgages into AAA-rated securities. Modelers usually come from a purely scientific background, but things like finance and government services aren't sciences--there's a human element. The models will never be perfect, and people who make and use them need to take a humble approach and second guess their own work. Bill James, one of the heroes of Moneyball, once said something along the lines of, "Any new metric should tell you 80% what you already knew, and 20% what you didn't. Less than 20% and it's not very useful, more than 20% and there's probably something wrong with the numbers." That "more than 20%" part is where RAND got caught. They believed their own studies, the fire department and mayor's office believed in RAND (and in the political usefulness of RAND's findings) and no one bothered to question whether the results were too good to be true.
The Wall Street Journal: In his new book, Joe Flood writes about a New York City governed by a technocratic, data-driven mayor facing a crippling budget deficit who is forced to close firehouses. “The Fires” chronicles the deteriorating 1970s New York of Mayor John Lindsay, when an epidemic of fires destroyed huge sections of the Bronx, Lower Manhattan, Harlem and Brooklyn. Sure, vast swaths of modern-day Queens aren’t about to go up in flames — we hope — but the book underscores undeniably eerie parallels between Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s well-run city and Lindsay’s New York. Like Bloomberg, Lindsay prized the notion of applying rigorous metrics to analyze the performance of city agencies. Faith in data-driven technocratic solutions led Lindsay to embrace the RAND Corporation, a military think tank brought in to make city services more efficient. The FDNY, led by a brilliant, modernizing chief named John O’Hagan, eventually adopted RAND’s reforms and closed dozens of firehouses in some of the city’s most run-down and fire-prone neighborhoods. (RAND, for it’s part, disputes the book’s characterization of its role. “The book’s central contention that fire companies were reallocated based on race or economic conditions in the neighborhoods where changes were made is not supported by the facts,” a RAND spokesman said.)
The author also wrote "Why the Bronx burned: Blame statisticians, not arson. And New York City could be making the same mistake all over again." for the New York Post, in which he said this: It was game two of the 1977 World Series, a chilly, blustery October night in the South Bronx. The Yanks were already down 2-0 in the bottom of the first inning when ABC’s aerial camera panned a few blocks over from Yankee Stadium to give the world its first live glimpse of a real Bronx Cookout. "There it is, ladies and gentlemen," Howard Cosell intoned. "The Bronx is burning." The scene quickly became a defining image of New York in the 1970s, a fitting summation of the decade perfect in every way but one: It never happened. Cosell, tapes of the game show, never said, "The Bronx is burning." Fire fatalities in New York City doubled in the 1970s, as President Jimmy Carter, Mayor John Lindsay and Fire Chief John O'Hagan faced a disaster of the government's own making, a new book claims. "It’s a great quote, if it had been a real one," says Gordon Greisman, who co-wrote and produced ESPN’s "The Bronx is Burning" mini-series based on the Jonathan Mahler book. "But we got all of this footage from Major League Baseball, including the entire broadcast of that game, and we went through all of it and it’s not there, because God knows if it was there we would have used it."
America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag is the second book by Sarah Palin. It was released on November 23, 2010, and has been described as containing selections from Palin's favorite speeches, sermons, and inspirational works, as well as vignettes about Americans she met in the fall of 2009 while on her book tour for Going Rogue: An American Life. One million copies will be printed for the first run, and a digital edition will be available on the day the book is released. She embarked on a 16-city book tour in America's "heartland" that began on November 23, 2010. The book made number two on the New York Times best seller list during its second week of release. Human Events magazine describes the book as patriotic and optimistic in tone and as bringing life to words from historical figures such as Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy and Abigail Adams. Townhall columnist Katie Pavlich recommends the book to "any American who believes in faith, family, love of country and even history". She describes the book as having a personal touch but as emphasizing faith-guided conservative principles much more than Palin's earlier book, Going Rogue. Amanda Marcotte's review in the Guardian claims that America by Heart is divisive and succeeds in "stoking the feelings of resentment in her target audience against the usual cadre of villains," while containing a subtext which implies that white fundamentalist Christians are the real Americans and that America is the only nation with the right to having feelings of "exceptionalism." The New York Times says the book is full of the patriotic reflections promised by the title, but it is also a road map to the political attacks Palin would make on Barack Obama if she were to run for U.S. President in 2012.
Pre-publication controversy: Several days before the book's release, the website Gawker published excerpts in which Palin criticized Levi Johnston (the father of her grandchild), the TV show American Idol, Hollywood filmmakers, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, and the Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Palin, who was described as angry about the leak, posted the following message on her Twitter page: "The publishing world is LEAKING out-of-context excerpts of my book w/out my permission? Isn't that illegal?" Within 48 hours, Palin's publisher had sued Gawker for copyright violations and had obtained a federal court order requiring Gawker to remove the material from its website, despite Gawker Media's claim of fair use. The American Spectator called the legal action a "huge victory". On November 20, 2010, Palin published her own "Exclusive Sneak Peek" of the book on her Facebook page. On the day the book was officially released, The Guardian printed extracts from the book on American values, criticism of Barack Obama and his health care legislation, criticism of Levi Johnston and the younger generation.
A paragraph from the new Sarah Palin book on American values: Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States when men were free.
Excerpts written by Sarah Palin in America by Heart, regarding Barack Obama: Too often we hear from the left a different spin on American exceptionalism _ a view that America is somehow worse than other countries, that it is hypocritical about its ideals, falls short of its responsibilities and is forever in need of correction. This has been the main thrust of President's Obama's speech on the world stage since assuming office in January 2009. [...] Take the recent health care debate as an example. The folks pushing President Obama's government health care bill seemed to think that we could be bought. But when we say we believe that our rights are God-given it means something. Those words in the Declaration of Independence are sacred: government can't legitimately violate or add to them.
"Still, I don't think it's an accident that the opponents of this new American awakening so often accuse Tea Partiers and others of being racist. For one thing, it's a guaranteed conversation stopper. Just saying the word racist instantly ends any legitimate debate. Just the accusation gives the accuser an excuse not to debate the issues at hand." - Sarah Palin, in America by Heart
From Townhall.com: Sarah Palin’s new book, America By Heart (available free with a subscription to Townhall Magazine), comes out today, and any American who believes in faith, family, love of country and even history, will enjoy reading it. Just by taking a look at the cover, Palin is adorned in flags, clearly representing the pride she has for America. Palin’s first New York Times Bestseller, Going Rogue, gave us an idea as to who Sarah Palin is, where she comes from, where she grew up, how she was raised, the feeling of moose eyeballs and of course, the 2008 Presidential campaign. Going Rogue allowed us to get to know Palin on a personal level without the political hoopla. America By Heart emphasizes everything personal about her first book and touches on many of the same topics such as becoming a mother, guiding Bristol through her teenage pregnancy, Alaska, but it reflects much more heavily on conservative principles guided by her faith in addition to historical references dating back to Roman times, JFK putting a man on the moon, Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan bringing down the Soviet Union and of course modern American politics.
From the National Review, by Kathryn Jean Lopez: Sarah Palin’s new book, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, is out today. It’s a good book that reflects exactly what people like about her — her passion for (as it happens) family, faith, and flag. Palin has always been good at highlighting good things that might not otherwise get national attention, and she certainly does that in this book. She praises “unsung heroes” like the Catholic women religious Sisters of Life, “whose members not only pray for the protection of human life but do the hard, selfless work of caring for human life. They help mothers have and raise their children, and they counsel and comfort those who have made decisions they regret.” Speaking of regret, she also mentions AbortionChangesYou.com, “a safe, nonjudgemental place for women and men who are troubled after their own abortions or those of someone close to them. It’s beyond politics or proselytizing, place that honors the legacy of feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony by helping women heal.”
The Christian Science Monitor said this about the book, upon its release: Sarah Palin has a new book out Tuesday, and so far it’s fulfilled one of its main purposes: keeping her in the news. The substance of “America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag” – sure to be a best-seller, as was her first work, “Going Rogue: An American Life” – is not surprising. She goes after President Obama, the first lady, the Attorney General, and pretty much anybody in the Obama administration who’s ever talked about race in America. She compares Mitt Romney to John F. Kennedy and finds the former president wanting. She likes hunting (“I eat therefore I hunt”), “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell, and movies with "submersive moral messages," such as “Juno,” “Knocked Up,” and “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.” Not so much Levi Johnston (the father of then-teen daughter Bristol’s baby), John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign advisers, or the press – referred to as “the media beast.” Then there’s “the shameful tendency on the left not simply to declare their opponents wrong, but to declare them evil.” Much of what leaked out about the book was posted on Gawker.com – at least until Saturday, when a federal judge ordered the excerpts scrubbed from the site as a copyright infringement. (Gawker retaliated with a page called “Sarah Palin Is Mad at Us for Leaking Pages From Her Book.”) According to publisher HarperCollins, Palin’s new literary effort “celebrates the enduring strengths and virtues that have made this country great,” while “ranging widely over American history, culture, and current affairs.”
Comments about in America by Heart about Levi Johnston, father of Bristol's child, Tripp: Of course, we all had to bite our tongues - more than once - as Tripp's father went on a media tour through Hollywood and New York, spreading untruths and exaggerated rhetoric. It was disgusting to watch as his fifteen minutes of fame were exploited by supposed adults taking advantage of a lost kid. [...] But we knew him well enough to see how confused he was during that time, and our hearts broke for him and the price he would pay.
Sarah Palin's comments in the book about the youth of today: In fact, we may be creating a generation of entitled little whiners. I came across an article that reported how growing numbers of employers today complain that many young job applicants exhibit all the signs of having been, there's no other word for it, spoiled. These young people feel entitled to jobs and salaries they haven't earned.
Product description: “The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for all the talk about the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Western obsession with promoting democracy by digital means backfire? In this spirited book, journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder—not easier—to promote democracy. Buzzwords like “21st-century statecraft” sound good in PowerPoint presentations, but the reality is that “digital diplomacy” requires just as much oversight and consideration as any other kind of diplomacy. Marshaling compelling evidence, Morozov shows why we must stop thinking of the Internet and social media as inherently liberating and why ambitious and seemingly noble initiatives like the promotion of “Internet freedom” might have disastrous implications for the future of democracy as a whole.
Evgeny Morozov wrote "Think Again: The Internet
They told us it would usher in a new era of freedom, political activism, and perpetual peace. They were wrong" for the periodical, Foreign Policy, in which he said this: "The Internet Has Been a Force for Good" No. In the days when the Internet was young, our hopes were high. As with any budding love affair, we wanted to believe our newfound object of fascination could change the world. The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village. Writing in 1994, a group of digital aficionados led by Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler published a manifesto modestly subtitled "A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" that promised the rise of "'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests." Nicholas Negroponte, then the famed head of the MIT MediaLab, dramatically predicted in 1997 that the Internet would shatter borders between nations and usher in a new era of world peace.
From www.EvgenyMorozov.com: Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (out in January 2011). He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's "Net Effect" blog about the Internet's impact on global politics (neteffect.foreignpolicy.com). Morozov is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He was formerly a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a fellow at George Soros's Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. Before moving to the US, Morozov was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc. Morozov's writings have appeared in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, The Sunday Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, Le Monde, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, Dissent and many other publications. He has appeared on CNN, CBS, SkyNews, CBC, Al Jazeera International, France 24, Reuters TV, NPR, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. His research has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail, Die Zeit, Il Sole 24 Ore, Der Standard, L'Express, AFP, Der Spiegel, Corriera della Serra, El País, Le Figaro, and many others
Evgeny Morozov wrote "How the Kremlin Harnesses the Internet" for The New York Times, in which the author said this: Hours before the judge in the latest Mikhail Khodorkovsky trial announced yet another guilty verdict last week, Russia’s most prominent political prisoner was already being attacked in cyberspace. No, Khodorkovsky’s Web site, the main source of news about the trial for many Russians, was not being censored. Rather, it had been targeted by so-called denial-of-service attacks, with most of the site’s visitors receiving a “page cannot be found” message in their browsers. Such attacks are an increasingly popular tool for punishing one’s opponents, as evidenced by the recent online campaign against American corporations like Amazon and PayPal for mistreating WikiLeaks. It’s nearly impossible to trace the perpetrators; many denial-of-service attacks go underreported, as it’s often hard to distinguish them from cases where a Web site has been overwhelmed by a huge number of hits. Although most of the sites eventually get back online, denial-of-service attacks rarely generate as much outrage as formal government attempts to filter information on the Internet. In the past, repressive regimes have relied on Internet firewalls to block dissidents from spreading forbidden ideas; China has been particularly creative, while countries like Tunisia and Saudi Arabia are never far behind. But the pro-Kremlin cyberattackers who hit Kodorkovsky’s Web site may reveal more about the future of Internet control than Beijing’s practice of adapting traditional censorship to new technology.
Evgeny Morozov also wrote "Edit This Page: Is it the end of Wikipedia?" for the Boston Review: Can you trust Wikipedia? Most of us have stopped asking and simply bookmarked it. That makes sense when you consider the alternatives: you can explore the first dozen or so Google search results, or you can go straight to the occasionally erroneous Wikipedia entry, typically culled from the very same search results. If you are looking for fast, up-to-date information, it is Wikipedia or Google (not Wikipedia or Britannica), and Wikipedia wins on speed. Wikipedia still has its critics, skeptics who doubt its merits as a reference source. But even they cannot deny the tremendous social innovation unleashed by Wikipedia-the-project. Every professional conference—on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to journalism to philanthropy—now includes the mandatory, impassioned plea for the industry to adopt The Wikipedia Model, as if it were a set of Lego pieces that could be ordered from eBay and assembled in a newsroom or on the trading floor.
Also for the Boston Review, the author, Evgeny Morozov, wrote "Texting Toward Utopia: Does the Internet spread democracy?" In part, this is what he said: In 1989 Ronald Reagan proclaimed that “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip”; later, Bill Clinton compared Internet censorship to “trying to nail Jell–O to the wall”; and in 1999 George W. Bush (not John Lennon) asked us to “imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread.” Such starry–eyed cyber–optimism suggested a new form of technological determinism according to which the Internet would be the hammer to nail all global problems, from economic development in Africa to threats of transnational terrorism in the Middle East. Even so shrewd an operator as Rupert Murdoch yielded to the digital temptation: “Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere,” he claimed. Soon after, Murdoch bowed down to the Chinese authorities, who threatened his regional satellite TV business in response to this headline–grabbing statement.
Winchester, bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, returns to the natural world with his epic new book, a "biography" of the Atlantic Ocean, from its origins 370 million years ago through the population of its shores by humanity and their interactions with it. He sees the Atlantic as the vital ingredient in the blooming of Western civilization. He scrutinizes the early explorations from the Vikings and Norsemen through Columbus, detailing the perils of the open sea. With his excellent research and engrossing anecdotes about the ocean as "a living thing," Winchester spotlights its inspiration on poets, painters, and writers in its majestic beauty. Although he does not neglect the chief tragedies of the Atlantic, like the slave trade and the maritime battles, Winchester occasionally flits beelike from scene to scene, and the facts become lost in a blur. Maybe this is the price for such a monumental undertaking. Nevertheless, Winchester's sea saga is necessary reading for those who want to understand the planet better, even as, he notes, our waters are rapidly changing from pollution, overfishing, and climate change.
Simon Winchester, OBE (born 28 September 1944), is a British author and journalist who resides in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel and his articles appear in several travel publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic. Simon Winchester lives in New York and on a farm in Massachusetts. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River. Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998) published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller, and the rights to a film version were optioned by Mel Gibson; likely to be directed by John Boorman. Though he still writes travel books, Winchester has repeated the narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman several times, many of which ended in books placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that Changed the World focused on geologist William Smith and was his second New York Times best seller. 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, as well as the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Erupted. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earth quake in A Crack in the Edge of the World. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham who helped to expose China to the western world. Simon Winchester's latest book Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories was released November 2, 2010.
Daniel Callahan is Senior Research Scholar and President Emeritus of the Center. He was its cofounder in 1969 and served as its president between 1969 and 1996. He is also co-director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy. Over the years his research and writing have covered a wide range of issues, from the beginning until the end of life. In recent years, he has focused his attention on ethics and health policy. He has served as a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Medical School and is now a Senior Scholar at Yale. He received his B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard. He has honorary degrees from the Charles University, Prague, the Czech Republic, the University of Colorado, Williams College, Oregon State University, the State University of New York and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Dr. Callahan is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences; a former member of the Director’s Advisory Committee, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and of the Advisory Council, Office of Scientific Responsibility, Department of Health and Human Services. He won the 1996 Freedom and Scientific Responsibility Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He is the author or editor of 41 books, including Taming the Beloved Beast: Why Medical Technology Costs are Destroying Our Health Care System (Princeton University Press, August 2009); Medicine and the Market: Equity vs. Choice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); The Research Imperative: What Price Better Health? (University of California Press, 2003); False Hopes (Simon & Schuster & Rutgers University Press, 1998); The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death (Simon & Schuster, 1993); What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress (Simon & Schuster, 1990); Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society (1987); The Tyranny of Survival (1973); Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (1970); Ethics in Hard Times (1982); and, with his wife, Sidney Callahan, Abortion: Understanding Differences (1984). He has contributed articles to Daedalus, Harpers, The Atlantic, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The New Republic, Health Affairs, and other journals.
Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama is a political commentary by American political commentator Bill O'Reilly, published in 2010. It was published on September 14, 2010. In his this his ninth book, Bill O'Reilly prompts further debate with President Barack Obama and the American people on the current state of the union. Bill offers a blunt political commentary, and offers some introspection, looking back at his own actions and those of past Americans who, he believes, have inspired a code of conduct for modern times. Source: Wikipedia. Tunku Varadarajan at The Daily Beast said this about the book: Bill O’Reilly is a liar. He’s also a total pinhead, to pluck a word from his newest book, which bears the glib and gassy title Pinheads and Patriots. On page 74 he writes, “My ‘social networking’ is done in person. I don’t twitter. Or tweet, or whatever they call it. Also, I don’t chat online, use an iPod, or rely on text messaging. I refuse to do these things because they do not help me.” Oh, really, O’Reilly? So what, then, is @oreillyfactor, a Twitter address “verified” as belonging to “Bill O’Reilly”? Dude, don’t you think anyone with the slightest animus against you—and there are millions who believe you’re the Devil’s spawn—would check this particular assertion against the facts?
HEY, YOU! YOU, THE AMERICAN! You who believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This book is about you. No spin.
In this age of Obama, all that you take for granted is changing, yet many Americans have no clue. So I've decided to fix that. After reading the following pages, you will know precisely what's going on in the United States. Then you can plan exactly how to deal with the massive shift in the way our country is being run. Trust me, you need to know what is really happening so that you can make effective decisions for yourself.
These changes are not all bad, but they're not all good, either. Many will hurt you and your family. Most media people and politicians won't tell you that because they don't care about you. But I do.
Why? It's very simple: you guys have made me rich and famous. I worked hard to position myself to succeed, but you made it happen.
Without you watching me on TV and reading my books, I would be just another energetic bloviator -- perhaps teaching school in Miami or reporting the news in Dallas. I appreciate the fact that millions of you have contributed to my success, so now it's payback time: I will vividly chronicle the changes occurring in an America that your great-grandparents would never recognize today, because knowing the facts is how you can preserve the things you love about this country most -- the things they loved, too.
As you must know by now, it has been a great adventure for me to write five consecutive bestselling nonfiction books over the years, and again, I'm grateful that you were there right along with me on those adventures.
,” by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama’s top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work.
,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, 
, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "
, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "
is a 2005 non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book has been described as melding pop culture with economics, but has also been decried as "amateur sociology." By late 2009, it had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. The book is a collection of 'economic' articles written by Levitt, an expert who has already gained a reputation for applying economic theory to diverse subjects not usually covered by "traditional" economists; he does, however, accept the standard neoclassical microeconomic model of rational utility-maximization. In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner argue that economics is, at root, the study of incentives.
