Word blends are the bunnies of language: they breed like motherfathers.

During the recent American Dialect Society meeting in Portland, plenty of blends were singled out. Assholocracy is an apt description of America, especially in an election year. Botoxionist refers to a doctor specializing in the forehead region of vain people. A brony is a bro who loves My Little Pony. That word was voted Least Likely to Succeed, but you can bet similar words will keep sprouting, particularly in the world of fashion.

Jeggings. Photo by Funkdooby. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

These atrocities aren’t going to stop. I predict the following items will be on sale soon.

(FYI, if any of these are plausible ideas, please call my agent, because I’d gladly sell my soul to the denim industry).

jear muffs
They’re not warm, but fashionistas are warmed by style, not warmth. For the elderly, how about jearing aids?

jonocle
Could be a little itchy for you Mr. Peanut types, but it can’t be worse than peanut allergies. So that evens out.

jape
Maybe Christopher Nolan can work this in to the new Batman movie.

jevlar vest
It doesn’t block bullets, which could be a problem given the recent rise in fashion police brutality.

jinnamon rolls
These will be less fattening than cinnamon rolls because they are inedible.

joon
If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a team of fashion scientists on the moon to change its chemical composition.

jipple
Some say nipples can’t be improved. They’re probably right, but it’s worth a shot.

joodle
The designer dog world, which pumps out teacup malti-poos, toy pitdoodles, and more word blends than a denim-only catalog, could easily mix some denim DNA into one of their hellish kennels of canine copulation.

jystal meth
Jeans and meth are both blue, so this seems like a natural idea that could be the plot of a future Smurfs movie.

jaby
A beautiful, intelligent, precious denim baby. It will look so good with the rest of your jamily.

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs.

Few times have been worse than the present to say anything good about the European Union (EU). It has faced many crises over the years, but none have been as serious as the current problems in the eurozone. Since news first broke of the difficulties in Greece in late 2009, pundits and political leaders have been falling over themselves in their efforts to ratchet up the language of doom and gloom. Under the circumstance, euro-optimists might be well-advised to lay low, and certainly they seem hard to find at the moment.

And yet this is the very time to remind ourselves of the achievements of the EU, because if we are to make sensible choices about where we go from here, we will need to have a clear idea of both its successes and its failures. Whatever happens to the euro, the EU is obviously on the brink of some major changes, generated not just by its immediate problems but also by some broader political and philosophical questions about the meaning and purposes of the European project.

Critics have focused on numerous themes in their recent attacks on the EU, among which is the recurring question of just what it means to be European. The EU is regularly accused of lacking clear purpose, and conventional wisdom suggests that Europeans have too little in common to weather the crises. After decades of convergence, we are now often told that Europeans are moving apart, with a growing backlash against European integration and – more specifically – a right-wing reaction against immigration, and talk of the failure of multiculturalism.

In truth, however, Europeans have a great deal in common , but they are often the last to realize this because they are repeatedly told about their differences, and the EU is repeatedly castigated for its lack of leadership and its failure to make a mark as an actor in the international system. The result is that many can no longer see the wood for the trees. It is only when we compare the European experience with that of other parts of the world that the patterns begin to emerge.

One of the clearest examples of Europeanism (if we understand this term as meaning the distinctive set of values and preferences that drive choices and preferences in Europe) is its secularism. Where support for organized religion is growing in almost every other part of the world, in Europe it is declining, and this is impacting the way Europeans think about politics, science, social relations, and moral questions.

Another example is offered by the redefinition of the role of states. It was in Europe that the Westphalian state system was born, and yet Europeans since the end of the Second World War have been reviewing their association with states: more are thinking of themselves as Europeans, while identity with nations has been growing. Meanwhile, Europeans have been rejecting traditional notions of patriotism, which – thanks to its long association with nationalism – has a bad reputation in Europe.

On the international front, the Europeanist model is notable for its support of civilian over military means for dealing with threats to security, its support for multilateralism over unilateralism, and its preference for the use of soft power (incentives and encouragement) over hard power (threats and punishment). Europeans long ago tired of war and conflict, and while they are still prepared to engage militarily where necessary, they would rather use diplomacy.

The examples go on: support for welfarism, the cosmopolitan association with universal ideas and the belief that local and global concerns cannot be separated, communitarian ideas about achieving a balance between individual and community interests, a belief in the merits of sustainable development, a belief in working to live rather than living to work, and association with a host of more specific beliefs, such as opposition to capital punishment and support for action on climate change.

Much of the current pessimism about the direction and future of European integration is generated by a belief that Europeans do not have enough in common to sustain the efforts of the EU. The result is that critics focus on the structural weaknesses of EU institutions and policies, of which – to be sure – there are many. But if we look beyond those weaknesses, we quickly find that Europeans (thanks in large part to the encouragement of integration under the auspices of the EU) have enough in common – and enough that distinguishes them from others, such as Russians or Americans – to sustain the European project over the long-term, whatever its short-term problems.

John McCormick is Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Politics at the Indianapolis campus of Indiana University in the United States. A dual British and American citizen, he has long been interested in pinning down the meaning and identity of the EU, and finds it particularly instructive to compare and contrast the European and American experiences. His most recent book, Europeanism, was published by OUP in 2010. He has also written Europeanism and The European Superpower (2007) as well as several textbooks on EU and comparative politics.

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Chiefs at Verde Reservation, Arizona. Source: NYPL Labs Stereogranimator.

During the 1800s, white settlers moved west by the tens of thousands, and the US cavalry went with them, battling Indian tribes along the way. One by one, tribes were forced to relinquish their homelands (on which they had lived for centuries) and relocate to reservations, often hundreds of miles away. By the late 1800s, some three hundred reservations had been created.

The purpose of the reservation system was, for the most part, to remove land from the Indians and to separate the Indians from the settlers. Reservations were usually created on lands not (yet) coveted by non-Indians. By the late 1800s, however, settlers were nearly everywhere, and Congress needed to develop a new strategy to prevent further bloodshed.

The government decided that instead of separating Indians from white society, Indians should be assimilated into white society. Assimilation of the Indians and the destruction of their reservations became the new federal goal.

Two very different social forces helped shaped this new policy: greed and humanitarianism. Many whites wanted Indian land and knew that they would have an easier time obtaining it if Indian tribes disappeared. This greed prompted Congress to pass the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, in February 1887. The Dawes Act was also favored by many non-Indian social reformers who were aware that Indians were suffering unmercifully under the government’s existing reservation policies, and they sincerely believed that the best way to help Indians overcome their plight and their poverty was by encouraging assimilation. Although their motives differed, both groups pressured Congress to pass the Dawes Act. The objectives of the Act, as the US Supreme Court has noted, “were simple and clear cut: to extinguish tribal sovereignty, erase reservation boundaries, and force the assimilation of Indians into the society at large.” Indian tribes had no say in the matter and were not even consulted.

Most Indian tribes had no concept of private land ownership. Rather, land was communally owned and everyone worked together to gather what they could from the land and shared its bounty. In order to compel assimilation of the Indians, a scheme was developed that would undermine Indian life and culture at its core: individual Indians would be forced to own land for private use. Indians would be converted into capitalists.

To accomplish the new policy of assimilation, the Dawes Act authorized the President of the United States to divide communally-held tribal lands into separate parcels (“allotments”). Each tribal member was to be assigned an allotment and, after a twenty-five-year “trust” period, would be issued a deed to it, allowing the owner to sell it. Once the allotments were issued, the remaining tribal land (the “surplus” land) would be sold to non-Indian farmers and ranchers. Congress hoped that by allowing non-Indians to live on Indian reservations, the goals of the settlers and those of the humanitarian social reformers could both be satisfied: land would become available for non-Indian settlement within Indian reservations, and Indian poverty would be eliminated once Indians accepted the Anglo-American concept of private ownership and saw and emulated the farming and ranching habits of their new neighbors. “Within a generation or two, it was thought, the tribes would dissolve, their reservations would disappear, and individual Indians would be absorbed into the larger community of white settlers.”

The first goal — opening large portions of Indian reservations to white settlement — was a huge success. During the next fifty years, nearly two-thirds of the 150 million acres of land that Indian tribes owned in 1887 was sold to non-Indians. The second goal, however, was a dismal failure. Rather than assist Indians improve their lives and overcome poverty, the General Allotment Act made their condition worse. For one thing, many allotments were unsuitable for small-scale agriculture, and even those that were suitable required money for the purchase of equipment, cattle, or seeds that few Indians had. Moreover, many Indians didn’t want to become farmers and ranchers, and viewed such a lifestyle as distasteful. It simply was naïve and unrealistic — if not callous and racist — to think that Indian life would be improved by a method that forcibly confiscated tribal land and allowed outsiders to live on Indian reservations.

Congress passed a law in 1934 that ended the allotment process, and no further parcels of land were allotted to Indians. But the damage had been done. Indeed, today, more non-Indians live on some Indian reservations than Indians, and Indian life has been changed dramatically. The 125th anniversary of the Dawes Act is not, for Indians, a cause for celebration.

Stephen Pevar is the author of The Rights of Indians and Tribes. A graduate of Princeton University (1968) and the University of Virginia School of Law (1971), he was a Legal Aid lawyer on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation from 1971 through 1974. Since 1976, Pevar has been on the national legal staff of the ACLU. He has litigated a number of cases in the field of Indian rights and has lectured extensively on the subject.

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I usually try to discuss words whose origin is so uncertain that, when it comes to etymology, dictionaries refuse to commit themselves. But every now and then words occur whose history has been investigated most convincingly, and their history is worth recounting. Such is the word odd. Everything is odd about it, including the fact that its original form has not survived in English. Odd appeared as odde in the fourteenth century. It was a borrowing from Scandinavian, where oddr meant “spear point” and metonymically “spear.” But next to oddr Old Icelandic oddi “triangle; a ‘tongue’ of land” existed. From “triangle” the meaning “an odd number,” as opposed to “an even number,” developed. The compound oddamaðr (ð has the value of th in Modern Engl. the, this, that) meant “the third man, he who gives the casting vote” or simply “an odd man,” that is, the third, fifth, and so forth. It is from oddamaðr that English has “odd man (out).” Icelandic oddatal “odd number” has the same structure as oddamaðr; tal is related to Engl. tell “count,” as in tell the beads and others (compare also the noun teller). Icelandic vera í odda continued into English as to be at odds, and this is also why heroes fight against overwhelming odds. Odd in twenty odd years, three hundred odd (any number between 300 and 400) has the same source. Even oddball, coined apparently in America close to the middle of the twentieth century, harkens back to the Old Scandinavian word. Such are the odds and ends of etymology. Some dictionaries devote separate entries to the adjective odd and the plural noun odds, but there is no need to do so. The singular — the odd — occurs in whist and golf; since the meaning of the odd is “handicap,” it resembles the plural in the common phrase odds-on. Odd is an ideal playing ground for puns. Is odd couple “an extra pair” or “two people who don’t match”? An odd trick in whist is not a peculiar trick but the seventh, the first the winners count toward the score (incidentally, the terminology of games is not the same in Great Britain and the United States).

Oddi was frequent in Scandinavian local names, and it was on a farm called Oddi that Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) grew up. Here a modern picture of Oddi is reproduced. This photo, along with geysers, volcanoes, mountains (in which only ghosts live), and Þingvellir (the place of the most ancient European parliament), is one of the best-known sights used in advertising trips to Iceland (þ = th in Engl. thin). Snorri was a great historian, poet, and politician. He wrote a book known today as The Prose Edda, or The Younger Edda, a manual of Old Scandinavian poetics and myths, as they were remembered in the thirteenth century. He also wrote a history of the kings of Norway (Heimskringla; the book still reads like a thriller — it exists in two excellent English translations) and possibly one the best sagas (The Saga of Egill; in English translations, usually one l is retained: Egil). He was killed by his enemies, and never has a more tragic event happened in the history of Icelandic literature. The origin of the name Edda is a mystery (though the conjectures by etymologists are many), and attempts have been made to connect Edda and Oddi, but the connection is, almost certainly, due to chance and is not more convincing than the one between Boston and best. It is for the sake of Snorri, if for nothing else, that the etymology of odd deserves our attention.

In Icelandic oddr, dd goes back to rd, and with ord we immediately find ourselves on familiar ground. Old Engl. ord meant “point, spot, place.” Its German cognate Ort still means “place,” though a few idioms have retained older senses. Above, I said that the demise of the original form of odd is surprising, and so it is. Old Engl. ord meant the same as Old Scandinavian odd, so why did people substitute a borrowing for the native word? But such events are common. If even they, them, and though were allowed to replace their native rivals, odd had to live up to its capricious meaning. Not only can we trace the paths of odd as it moved from language to language; we even know where the ancient form ord- came from. In Old Germanic, the consonant z became r. Consequently, when we come across an Old Germanic word with r, we have to decide whether it traces back to r or to z. For example, in the verb rear the first r is old, while the second began its life as z. The change of z to r is called rhotacism, from the name of the Greek letter rho, and we can affirm with certainty (a rare case in etymological studies) that r in ord is rhotacized z. The information comes from names.

Both Ort- and Odd- were common elements in Germanic personal names like Oddgeirr (spear-spear, a tautological compound: both elements mean the same, because geirr means spear, as its English cognate still does in Engl. garfish and garlic, let alone the common favorite Garfield; clearly, the boy was expected to grow up a great warrior; I once devoted a post to such compounds), Oddleifr (a much sadder name, for it refers to what has been left of spear play: presumably, the enemies’ corpses were meant), Oddrún (a female name: “spear’s counselor”), Þoroddr (Þórr was one of the great gods of the ancient Scandinavians), and so forth. In some cases, people may have no longer been aware of the inner form of the most popular names, such as -rún and -leifr, but no one would have missed the message of Oddgeirr. In continental Germanic, we find Ortger, a twin of Oddgeirr, Ortwin, Ortlieb, and other devotees of the spear. Against this background, the name Usdibadus, recorded in Greek letters, comes in most useful. Usdibadus was a Gepid (an East Germanic tribe closely related to the Goths), and his name followed the familiar pattern: usdi + badus, that is, “spear” + “battle.” Usdi- is an obvious cognate of ord, with s, pronounces as z before d, not rhotacized (East Germanic lacked rhotacism: either this change happened later than the fourth century, when the Gothic Bible was translated from the Greek, or it simply never had it). I think his mother called him Uzdi. So this is then the beginning of ord- ~ odd: it was uzd-, from usdo- “spear (point),”perhaps from uz + do, approximately “up” + “put,” an object pointing toward its target. Quite appropriately its Lithuanian cognate means “thistle.” Such is the long history of our word, from Indo-European or at least Germanic warfare to modern golf and whist. If I had a taste for coy titles (and I once professed my dislike of them), I would have called this essay “From Sword to Ploughshare, from Spear to Niblick, Or an Episode in the History of Indo-European Disarmament.”

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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February 8, 1904

Japanese Attack Port Arthur, Starting Russo-Japanese War

On February 8, 1904, just before midnight, Japanese destroyers entered the harbor of Port Arthur (now Lü-shun, China). Soon after, they unleashed torpedoes against Russian ships in a surprise attack that began the Russo-Japanese War.

The conflict grew over competition between Russia and Japan for territory in both Korea and Manchuria, in northern China. Japan had won Port Arthur, at the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula, from China in an 1894–1895 war. Russia joined with other European powers to force it to relinquish the port, however — and then three years later had compelled China to grant the city to it. These actions rankled Japan, as did Russia’s refusal to honor a promise to withdraw troops from Manchuria. Japan decided to go to war.

The attack on Port Arthur resumed in the late morning of February 9, when bigger Japanese ships began shelling the Russian fleet and nearby forts. The Russians put up more resistance than expected, however, and the Japanese ships withdrew.

The attack on Port Arthur was inconclusive, but the rest of the war went largely Japan’s way. The Japanese enjoyed several victories in 1904, seizing Korea in March, and defeating Russian forces twice in Manchuria during the summer. More success followed in 1905, with the surrender of Port Arthur in January, a victory over a large Russian army in Manchuria in March, and a decisive naval battle at Tsushima Strait in May that destroyed the Russian fleet. Russia’s government, facing unrest at home, was forced to seek peace.

The Russo-Japanese War marked the first victory of a non-European nation against a European one in modern times. It also contributed to unrest in Russia that would lead, more than a decade later, to the Russian Revolution.

“This Day in World History” is brought to you by USA Higher Education.
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Following the phenomenal popularity of Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens produced two short volumes of Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples, in response to the appearance of Sketches of Young Ladies by “Quiz.”

Each volume purports to dissect the characteristics of familiar types such as “The Bashful Young Gentleman,” “The Literary Young Lady,” and “The Couple who Coddle themselves.” Whimsical, satirical, witty and exuberant, the sketches ridicule the behaviour of their subjects with perfect comic effect, rendering Mr Whiffler, Mrs Chopper and their companions instantly recognizable. They offer intriguing glimpses of courtship rituals and relations between the sexes at the outset of the Victorian era, and fascinating evidence of a writer learning his craft and refining his style. Here, we’ve excerpted two of our favourite extracts: “The Loving Couple” and “The Formal Couple.”

The Loving Couple

Let all couples, present or to come, therefore profit by the example of Mr. and Mrs. Leaver, themselves a loving couple in the first degree.

“Augusta, my soul,” says Mr. Leaver. “Augutus, my life,” replies Mrs. Leaver. “Sing some little ballad, darling,” quoth Mr. Leaver. “I couldn’t, indeed, dearest,” returns Mrs. Leaver. “Do, my dove,” says Mr. Leaver. “I couldn’t possibly, my love,” replies Mrs. Leaver; “and it’s very naughty of you to ask me.” “Naughty, darling!” cries Mr. Leaver. “Yes, very naughty, and very cruel,” returns Mrs. Leaver, “for you know I have a sore throat, and that to sing would give me a great pain. You’re a monster and I hate you. Go away!” Mrs. Leaver has said “Go away,” because Mr. Leaver has tapped her under the chin: Mr. Leaver not doing as he is bid, but on the contrary, sitting down beside her, Mrs. Leaver slaps Mr. Leaver; and Mr. Leaver in returns slaps Mrs. Leaver, and it being now time for all persons present to look the other way, they look the other way, and hear a still small sound as of kissing.

The Formal Couple

Everything with the formal couple resolves itself into a matter of form. They don’t call upon you on your account, but their own; not to see how you are, but to show you how they are: it is not a ceremony to do honour to you, but to themselves, – not sue to your position, but to theirs. If one of a friend’s children die, the formal couple are as sure and punctual in sending to the house as the undertaker … If the formal couple have a family (which they sometimes have), they are not children, but little, pale, sour, sharp-nosed men and women; and so exquisitely brought up, that they might be very old dwarfs for anything that appeareth to the contrary. Indeed, they are so acquainted with forms and conventionalities, and conduct themselves with such strict decorum, that to see the little girl break a looking-glass in some wild outbreak, or the little boy kick his parents, would be to any visitor an unspeakable relief and consolation.

These extracts are taken from Charles Dickens’ Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples, edited by Paul Schlicke. Paul Schlicke is Honorary Senior Lecturer at University of Aberdeen. For Oxford World’s Classics he has introduced and annotated Hard Times and Nicholas Nickleby. He was President of the Dickens Society of America in 1994, President of the Dickens Fellowship 2003-5, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Charles Dickens Museum, 2005-9.

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A senior colleague recently shared with me the trials of going through a bout of cancer treatment. Physicians are not known to make the best patients and the transition he described was not an easy one. At one point he said, “I wanted to hang a sign over my bed saying ‘P.I.P.’ — Previously Important Person.” To be frank, I was astounded. This man is not only a highly respected and seasoned clinician, but an internationally lauded researcher and medical leader, whose accomplishments have garnered various recognitions and lofty acclaim. And yet, being a patient, in spite of what he described as excellent care, quickly led to feeling that “who he was” was largely overshadowed by “what he had.”

Source: New York Public Library

The word patient comes from the Latin patientem, meaning someone who is sick or suffering. The word patience — to bear or endure without complaint — shares the identical Latin etymology. Perhaps this common derivation suggests that it takes patience to be a patient. But what is it that patients must bear and endure without complaint? Think of even your most trivial recent health care encounter. Having your call put on hold; being kept waiting for an appointment; having to disrobe or expose private information; any of these might lead you to bemoan that you felt “just like a patient” — without a doubt, the most common critique of any health-care encounter. Feeling “like a patient” means feeling defined based on a problem or diagnosis. Personhood thrives on the expression of individual identity and being able to exercise freedom and choice. Patienthood is based on diagnostic specificity; it demands adherence to certain clinical or institutional conformities and routines, in return for which it provides organ or disease specific, evidence-based options.

A woman I helped look after many years ago with leukemia was admitted for treatment to our city hospital. Being young and fiercely independent, she struggled, not merely with having to face a life threatening illness, but the sudden assault on her sense of who she was. Almost overnight, she had to relinquish her freedom and submit to strict infection controls, including isolation on the bone marrow transplant unit. Like any patient, she was assigned a chart number, given a standard plastic wrist identification bracelet, and issued the usual, drab hospital garb. Her treatment, tailored according to detailed laboratory findings and genetic markers, was highly aggressive and invasive. One morning after having encountered her share of hardships, including total hair loss, nausea and various nasty complications, she emerged from her room wearing a beautiful, full-length blue satin nightgown. Those of us who worked closely with her realized immediately that this was no frivolous gesture. In fact, this was a way of asserting herself, a way of saying: “This is who I am,” “I am more than my white counts,” “Please, see me.”

Similarly, Jean Dominique Bauby, the former editor of Elle magazine, asked “to be seen.” He had suffered a massive stroke at the age of forty-three, resulting in locked-in syndrome. Aptly named, this condition renders the patient trapped inside a paralyzed body, while their mental faculties remain intact. And yet, Bauby was able to “blink-out” (with the number of blinks corresponding to specific letters of the French alphabet) his now famous book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (the film version was released in 2007). During the course of his harrowing experience, Bauby wrote, “If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.” In other words, “complete and utter paralysis notwithstanding, I see myself-and as important, want to be seen-as someone who understands and appreciates beauty, luxury, and haut couture.”

It was of course foolish for me to assume that my colleague’s accomplishments would somehow stave off the identity depleting encroachments of being ill. Clearly, personhood is soluble in patienthood. For those of us who work in health care, the message is clear. We must do all we can to see our patients for who they are and not just what they have. Is that really asking too much? I think not.

Dr. Harvey Max Chochinov is an international leader in palliative care and author of Dignity Therapy: Final Words for Final Days. He is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba and Director of the Manitoba Palliative Care Research Unit at CancerCare Manitoba. His seminal publications on psychosocial issues in advanced illness have helped define core competencies and standards of palliative end-of-life care. Dr. Chochinov has also been a guest lecturer in many major academic institutions around the world. He has been lauded for his contributions to palliative care, with awards and recognitions coming from the International Psycho-oncology Society, the Canadian Association of Psychosocial Oncology, the Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine, and the American Association of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

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What did you find most surprising in your research and interaction with the Tea Party? On balance, how were you received by the people you interviewed?

When we would first reach out to local Tea Party groups, they were often quite suspicious of us, particularly because we come from Harvard University. Many we spoke to in the Tea Party believe that East Coast liberals are elitists who look down on “everyday Americans” like themselves. They also wondered, since our politics are not in line with theirs, whether we were truly interested in understanding their political activity, or whether we just wanted to attack them.

Meeting in person, however, people were extremely welcoming – which surprised us, at least at first, given how nervous people had been over email. Partly, it may be that getting to see us in person made us seem less intimidating or suspect. But also, these older, middle-class people, particularly those in the South, have very strong norms of hospitality. They frequently referred to us as their guests, and went out of their way to make us comfortable in their meeting places and homes. Only on one occasion was anyone less than polite to us at a Tea Party event – and numerous other members were clearly unhappy with the outburst, and several went out of their way to apologize privately afterwards.

How would you assess importance of the web in helping to spread and sustain the Tea Party’s messaging?

The web has played a crucial role in helping organize what would otherwise be a relatively dispersed group of older, extremely conservative people. In fact, we suspect that those in the Tea Party, particularly the older members, became more Internet-savvy as a result of their Tea Party activity! But the Internet has also allowed for the spread of ideas that are sometimes far outside the mainstream of political discourse. Some of the more conspiratorial concerns we heard (for instance, about the need to revive the gold standard, about the imminent threat of martial law, about the dangers of modernizing the electric grid) occasionally appeared on Fox News or conservative talk radio, but largely survive online.

Who the “leaders” of the Tea Party are continues to be a subject of debate. Do you expect the Tea Party ever to have a centralized organizational structure?

No. In our book, we discuss the Tea Party as the confluence of three long-standing strands of conservativism, which worked together in new ways in the first years of the Obama Administration. First, older, white, middle-class conservatives, many of whom had been previously involved in politics or local affairs, were demoralized after the electoral defeats of 2008, and looking for new leadership. Second, conservative media outlets, particularly Fox News and talk radio, helped mobilize and direct these grassroots conservatives. Third, long-standing extreme free-market advocacy groups, like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, took advantage of the new activism to build connections with grassroots conservatives and to push their agenda in Washington. These groups had similar goals in 2009 and 2010 – revitalizing conservatism, derailing the Obama Administration’s progressive agenda, and pushing the Republican Party to the right. But, as we discuss in the book, these groups do not always have the same policy goals, and in 2012, the Republican Party will have to appeal to moderates to win back the presidency. So it is unclear that the Tea Party label will continue to be a banner that these various conservative forces can rally behind.

Does the possibility exist for a split within the Republican Party?

Not because of the Tea Party. There are always factions within a party, and the Tea Party supporters make up a major component of the Republican base. To the extent they are frustrated with the Republican Party, it is because they see the party as inadequately conservative, not because the Tea Party voters are political independents.

What differences do you foresee in the role of the Tea Party in the 2012 elections versus the role they played in 2010?

First of all, Tea Party sympathizers will make up a far smaller portion of the electorate in 2012. Far fewer people vote in midterm elections, and those who do tend to be older, wealthier, and more conservative. In general elections, like 2012, we tend to see higher rates of turnout among the young and among minorities. So the influence of the Tea Party at the grassroots will be diluted. The elite aspects of the Tea Party, of course, will still be influence campaign contributors. And we are seeing the Tea Party play a role in the Republican primaries – a point we discuss in detail in our New York Times post.

Vanessa Williamson is a PhD candidate in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University and co-author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Previously, she served as the Policy Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

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With the bicentenary of Charles Dickens‘ birth on the 7th February, here is an excerpt from one of his most popular novels, Oliver Twist, part of our Oxford World Classics series. The story of Oliver, who suffers a miserable existence in a workhouse and later escapes to London, is an unromantic portrayal of criminals, gangs, and the cruel treatment of orphans in Victorian London. Here we see Oliver in a vulnerable state in the workhouse before he is made aware of what his future holds. This month, OUP also publishes Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor which gives an historical insight into the real lives of people who Dickens based his characters on. And now on to Oliver. –Alice

Oliver had not been within the walls of the workhouse a quarter of an hour; and had scarcely completed the demolition of a second slice of bread; when Mr. Bumble, who had handed him over to the care of an old woman, returned; and, telling him it was a board night, informed him that the board had said he was to appear before it forthwith.

Not having a very clearly defined notion of what a live board was, Oliver was rather astounded by this intelligence, and was not quite certain whether he ought to laugh or cry. He had no time to think about the matter, however; for Mr. Bumble gave him a tap on the head, with his cane, to wake him up: and another on the back to make him lively: and bidding him to follow, conducted him into a large whitewashed room, where eight or ten fat gentlemen were sitting round a table. At the top of the table, seated in an arm-chair rather higher than the rest, was a particularly fat gentleman with a very round, red face.

‘Bow to the board,’ said Bumble. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were lingering in his eyes; and seeing no board but the table, fortunately bowed to that.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ said the gentleman in the high chair.

Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made him tremble; and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made him cry; and these two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool. Which was a capital way of raising his spirits, and putting him quite at his ease.

‘Boy,’ said the gentleman in the high chair, ‘listen to me. You know you’re an orphan, I suppose?’

‘What’s that, sir?’ inquired poor Oliver.

‘The boy is a fool – I thought he was,’ said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

‘Hush!’ said the gentleman who had spoken first. ‘You know you’ve got no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.

‘What are you crying for?’ inquired the gentleman in the white waistcoat. And to be sure it was very extraordinary. What could the boy be crying for?

‘I hope you say your prayers every night,’ said another gentleman in a gruff voice; ‘and pray for the people who feed you, and take care of you – like a Christian.’

‘Yes, sir,’ stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was unconsciously right. It would have been very like a Christian, and a marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people who fed and took care of him. But he hadn’t, because nobody had taught him.

‘Well! You have come here to be educated, and taught a useful trade,’ said the red-faced gentleman in the high chair.

‘So you’ll begin to pick oakum to-morrow morning at six o’clock,’ added the surly one in the white waistcoat.

For the combination of both these blessings in the one simple process of picking oakum, Oliver bowed low by the direction of the beadle, and was then hurried away to a large ward: where, on a rough hard bed, he sobbed himself to sleep. What a noble illustration of the tender laws of England. They let paupers go to sleep!

Poor Oliver! He little thought, as he lay sleeping in happy unconsciousness of all around him, that the board had that very day arrived at a decision which would exercise the most material influence over all his future fortunes. But they had.

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870), novelist, was born on 7 February 1812 at 13 Mile End Terrace, Portsea, Portsmouth, the second child and first son of John Dickens, an assistant clerk in the navy pay office, stationed since 1808 in Portsmouth as an ‘outport’ worker, and his wife, Elizabeth, née Barrow. There can be few other English writers — apart, of course, from Shakespeare — with such widespread influence as Dickens, not only on their successors in the national literature, but also on major foreign writers, and few have been the subject of so many outstanding treatises by foreign critics. Oliver Twist, is one of his most popular and personal works. Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor presents the story of the discovery that as a young man Charles Dickens lived only a few doors from a major London workhouse for the first time, and shows that the two periods Dickens lived in that part of London – before and after his father’s imprisonment in a debtors’ prison – were profoundly important to his subsequent writing career. Happy 200th Charlie!

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By Edward Zelinsky

On a personal level, I enjoyed the news reports that Mitt Romney holds assets worth tens of millions of dollars in his individual retirement account (IRA). These reports confirm a central thesis of The Origins of the Ownership Society, namely, the extent to which defined contribution accounts, such as IRAs and 401(k) accounts, have become central features of American life.

I was also gratified as colleagues, friends and neighbors who are often skeptical of what I do for a living (“You actually teach about pensions?”) sought my opinion about Mitt Romney’s IRA. Since we don’t have all of the details, my answers entailed a certain amount of conjecture. For those too sheepish to ask, here are the questions most frequently posed to me and my answers:

Mitt Romney. Photo by Gage Skidmore. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Because he was a better investor than you. It appears that Mitt Romney’s IRA largely consists of investments he made while a partner at Bain Capital and of the proceeds from such Bain investments. Those investments were apparently made in Mitt Romney’s 401(k) account when the investments had relatively little value. When he left Bain, these investments were rolled over, i.e., transferred tax-free, to Mitt Romney’s IRA. While these investments were modest when initially made, they are now quite valuable. That is what successful private equity investors do.

When must Mitt Romney pay taxes on the assets in his IRA?

April 1, 2018. He could start paying taxes before then but what the Code calls his “required beginning date” is April 1, 2018. This date is set by a statutory formula which is quizzical even by the standards of the Internal Revenue Code: Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947. He will be 70 years old on March 12, 2017. Six months after this birthday is September 12, 2017. Therefore, Mitt Romney must start to draw down and pay tax on his IRA as of April 1, 2018.

How much tax will Mitt Romney have to pay then?

It will depend on the size of the IRA at that time and the tax rates then in effect. Because Mrs. Romney is only two years younger than her husband, the first distribution from Mitt Romney’s account on or before April 1, 2018 must be at least 3.65% of the account as it then exists. This percentage is based on the Romneys’ joint life expectancies as determined by Treasury actuarial tables. Thus, for example, if Mitt Romney’s IRA is worth $100,000,000 on December 31, 2017, his first distribution from this account on or before April 1, 2018 must be $3,650,000. Assuming that Mitt Romney made only tax deductible contributions to the account, all of this distribution will be taxed as ordinary income, at whatever tax rate then prevails.

What about subsequent years?

Each year, as the IRA holder ages, the required distribution (and thus taxable income) increases as a percentage of the current account balance. For example, when Mitt Romney is 75, his required IRA distribution will be 4.37% of the account as it then exists. When Mitt Romney is 80 years old, he will be required to receive and pay ordinary income taxes on 5.35% of the IRA balance as it then exists.

Wouldn’t Mitt Romney have been better off from a tax perspective keeping these investments as capital assets outside his IRA?

We don’t know. Had these investments been held directly by Mitt Romney as capital assets, they would have been more lightly taxed as capital gains. In contrast, Mitt Romney will pay tax at higher ordinary income rates when these investments are eventually distributed to him from his IRA. However, there are two potentially offsetting factors which Mitt Romney likely considered as part of his tax planning. First, some, perhaps many, of these investments may yield ongoing ordinary income. As to this annual income, it is typically considered desirable to engage in the kind of tax-deferral Mitt Romney has obtained by holding assets in his IRA.

Second, if assets are sold inside the IRA, those sales are tax-deferred. In contrast, if Mitt Romney had kept these assets in his own name and sold them, tax would have been due upfront on each sale. It appears that Mitt Romney concluded that these latter two considerations made it tax efficient to put these investments into his 401(k) account and, from there, into his IRA.

What is a “foreign blocker”?

The term “blocker” is today used to describe a corporation interposed between an investor and an investment. A foreign blocker is a blocker incorporated outside of the United States, typically in a low tax jurisdiction like the Cayman Islands.

Why did Mitt Romney use a foreign blocker for his IRA?

Probably to avoid the Internal Revenue Code’s unrelated business income tax (UBIT).

What is the UBIT?

Otherwise tax-exempt institutions, like pension trusts, university endowments and Mitt Romney’s IRA, trigger federal tax if, instead of investing to obtain dividends, interest and similar forms of passive investment income, they receive active earnings from business operations. The UBIT is the provision of the Code which levies this tax on the active business income received by tax-exempt entities. It is likely that many Bain assets are active businesses and thus would generate UBIT if owned directly by Mitt Romney’s IRA.

So how does the foreign blocker work?

Instead of the exempt institution itself holding active business assets, those assets are held by a foreign corporation which pays little or no corporate tax to its home jurisdiction. This foreign corporation then pays dividends to the exempt institution. These dividends are then tax-deferred to the exempt entity such as Mitt Romney’s IRA.

Without more detail, we don’t know if the foreign blocker corporation actually reduced Mitt Romney’s effective tax obligation. If the foreign blocker corporation owns U.S. business assets, the blocker will pay U.S. tax on its U.S. business income. This typically results in no net tax savings since the U.S. tax obligation is merely shifted from the tax-exempt institution to the blocker corporation.

If, however, the foreign blocker holds foreign business assets, it is possible for the blocker to spare the U.S. exempt institution from U.S. tax while paying little or no foreign tax. In that case, the foreign blocker is a real tax winner.

To evaluate this further, we need to know more about the portfolio of Mitt Romney’s IRA. It is, however, unlikely that a Bain Capital partner would have used a foreign blocker unless some tax savings resulted.

Is this unusual?

Hardly. The use of foreign blockers is quite common. You (here my previously indignant questioner typically becomes quite sheepish) may be covered by a pension plan which uses foreign blockers to defer UBIT on what otherwise would be currently taxed business income. You may also benefit from or contribute to a university endowment which uses foreign blockers.

Can I invest my IRA funds like Mitt Romney?

In theory, yes. In practice, no. There are mutual funds which invest in private equity deals of the sort Mitt Romney holds in his IRA. However, under the best of circumstances, these funds need to be scrutinized carefully as to their management fees and whether they really obtain the kinds of investment opportunities available to a Bain Capital partner. I’m skeptical.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears here.

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February 6, 1935

Turkey Holds First Election That Allows Women to Vote

On February 6, 1935, the women of Turkey were allowed to vote in national elections for the first time. Women were even allowed to stand for office — and eighteen female candidates were elected to Turkey’s parliament.

The radical reform was part of Kemal Mustafa Ataturk’s effort to secularize and modernize Turkish society. Ataturk, a military officer, led a movement that took control of Turkey in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in World War I. Ataturk was committed to westernizing Turkish society, as evidenced by his adoption of German business laws, Italian criminal laws, and Swiss civil laws. One of the hallmarks of his effort was to recognize the rights of women. They were allowed to vote and run for local office in 1930. A law from December of 1934 expanded these rights to include national parliamentary elections.

That as many as eighteen women were elected to the parliament in the first election is a bit deceptive. In the early republic, when Ataturk ran a one-party state, his party picked all candidates. A small percentage of seats were set aside for women, so naturally those female candidates won. When multi-party elections began in the 1940s, the share of women in the legislature fell, and the 4% share of parliamentary seats gained in 1935 was not reached again until 1999. In the parliament of 2011, women hold about 9% of the seats. Nevertheless, Turkish women gained the right to vote a decade or more before women in such Western European countries as France, Italy, and Belgium — a mark of Ataturk’s far-reaching social changes.

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Charles Dickens loved birthdays and always celebrated his own in style. So, in the face of those who are complaining about being Dickensed-out already, my view is that we can’t party enough.

One of the earliest letters we have in Dickens’s hand is an invitation to his friend and fellow journalist Thomas Beard to his twentieth birthday party – a “chosen few” friends and family are summoned to “join in a friendly quadrille.” I wish I’d been there, or at one of the outings he would devise later in life: his thirty-second birthday, say, when “unless it should rain cats, dogs, pitchforks, and Cochin China poultry,” he is rounding up half a dozen of his friends to go walking with him in Kent (his old childhood beat). They ended up with dinner at Wates Hotel in Gravesend; Dickens wrote ahead to order iced champagne and a good fire ready to greet them.

Family birthdays also got the Dickens treatment, with all stops being pulled out for his eldest son Charley, who had helpfully arrived on Twelfth Night (6^th January). Charley’s sixth birthday was a real show-stopper. Not content with merely laying on the Magic Lantern show currently fashionable at parties for privileged under-tens, Dickens jacked up the excitement to fever pitch by buying up the stock of Hamley’s toy shop and coming out as a conjuror.  He had practised for hours on his own and was a great hit, with his tricks of flying money and burning handkerchiefs, although I imagine the patter must have been the best part of the show. As late as 1857 he was devising a birthday treat for his wife Catherine: the occasion of their first stay at Gad’s Hill, the country house he had bought in Kent. A year later, almost to the day, he was ejecting her from the family home.

Dickens felt birthdays intensely. He feels for his childhood self who works at the blacking factory and celebrates his birthday by screwing up his courage to go into a pub in Parliament Street and enquire, “‘What is your very best – the VERY best – ale, a glass?’”  In Bleak House we see him feeling for those who do not know when their birthdays are, like illiterate Jo the crossing sweeper, or who have unbirthdays, like illegitimate Esther Summerson. “‘Far better, little Esther,’” her godmother tells her, “‘that you had had no birthday; that you had never been born!’”

So it’s good to see the world stepping into its global glitter gear for him this year, with a myriad of festivities, including a dinner at the Mansion House in the City of London, and a reception at Buckingham Palace. Plenty of exhibitions too, radio and TV shows galore, theatrical performances and shelf-fulls of pleasant kitsch. I warm to tributes with an accent on the collective. On publication day, Dickens’s novels arrived into a sphere of sociable merchandizing. While you were reading the novel in its nineteen monthly parts you could also be dancing along – to even the darkest novels, with the Little Dorrit Polka and the Little Dorrit Schottische (think polka but slower). So I’m enjoying the Dickens board game which my son gave me for Christmas. And I like the sound of the British Council’s “Sketching the City” initiative, a world-wide invitation to us all to document our own city, as Dickens did London with his Sketches by Boz. The BBC TV’s Arena programme “Dickens on Film” took us on a journey which had both communal and individual resonance. We could sit beside our childhood selves drinking in those formative earlier film and TV adaptations, that very particular Sunday teatime moment for those of a certain age.

Sunday teatimes aside, it’s urban and night-time Dickens which is coming out strongest in the festivities. Less of the plum pudding and jokes; more darkness, grit, and mystery. The Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London ends with a brilliant film essay by William Raban, entitled “The Houseless Shadow”. Inspired by Dickens’s 1860 essay “Night Walks”, Raban filmed night-time London over five months, blending into his surroundings with his equipment in a supermarket bag, his tripod strapped to a luggage trolley. Catch it if you can; the exhibition is on until June 10^th .

Jenny Hartley is Professor of English Literature at Roehampton University. Her most recent book, The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, published this month. She is also the author of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, two books on British women’s writing from the Second World War, and The Reading Groups Book, a pioneering survey of reading groups. For the last ten years she has been a leading member of the Prison Reading Groups project.

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On World Cancer Day 2012, we speak with Dr Lauren Pecorino, author of Why Millions Survive Cancer: the Successes of Science, to learn the latest in the field of cancer research. – Nicola

There are so many myths about cancer that it is sometimes difficult to understand exactly what it is. Can you briefly explain how cancer develops?

Cancer is a disease of the human genome. Many agents that cause cancer cause permanent changes to your genes. These permanent changes are called mutations. Cancer is usually caused by the accumulation of mutations over time. This is why cancer risk increases with age. The altered genes may produce faulty proteins that lead to abnormal cell growth and this appears as a tumour. Cancer is characterized by abnormal cell growth and the ability of tumour cells to spread throughout the body. It is this second characteristic, called metastasis that is the most difficult aspect to treat.

It is said that cancer now affects one in three people over a lifetime. What’s the latest progress in the field of cancer research?

There has been tremendous progress in the field of cancer management. The good news is that trends in death rates are decreasing for many cancers though that is not to say for all cancers. There are millions of cancer survivors who have had their diagnosis ten or more years ago. Many people are now living with cancer. Conventional treatments such as surgical procedures have been refined and new drugs that target tumour-specific molecules have proved efficient and promises less side effects.

In addition, we are learning to make lifestyle choices that science has shown reduces cancer risk — the most obvious being not smoking. We also have cancer screening programmes that can catch cancer early and even prevent cancer by treating pre-cancerous growths. The latest means for preventing a specific type of cancer is a cancer vaccine. Interestingly the vaccine designed to prevent cervical cancer vaccine also prevents several other cancers caused by the human papilloma virus such as some head and neck cancers.

What do you see as the priorities for future cancer research? Where will the next great advances be?

I see four main priorites for future cancer research.

1 –  To develop better and less invasive diagnostics so that we can detect cancer earlier. It is well-known that catching cancer earlier gives a better outcome or prognosis.

2 –  To expand our understanding of the individual molecular differences between tumors and to be able to fully practice personalized medicine which allows a better match between a patient and a drug. This understanding will need to be supported by technology that allows a patient’s tumour DNA to be sequenced (similar to the methods used for the Human Genome Project).

3 –  To understand if we can turn a cancer cell back into a normal cell. This may sound strange but lessons from stem cells and cloning tell us that changing one cell type into another is possible.

4 –  To better understand metastasis and how we can better treat it. The spreading of cancer cells throughout the body is the most difficult aspect of treating cancer and so this must be a priority.

Do you have any recommendations on how we can reduce our own cancer risk?

The media is full of headlines about what affects cancer risk. The best advice is evidence-based recommendations published by scientific journals and professional organizations such as the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) and the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR). The following recommendations are evidence-based:

1 –  Maintaining a healthy weight throughout life may be one of the most important ways to protect against cancer (see 2 and 3 below).
2 –  Be physically active.
3 –  Eat a healthy diet containing real foods vs. processed food.
4 –  Don’t smoke.
5 –  If consumed at all, limit alcoholic drinks to two for men and one for women a day.
6 –  Participate in cancer screening programs.
7 –  Ensure daughters receive the cervical cancer vaccine. But note this only protects against approx. 70% of all cases. Participation in cervical screening is still necessary.
8 –  Get symptoms checked by a physician: early detection leads to a better diagnosis.
9 – Protect against extensive sun exposure.
10 – Women should consider having children younger and avoid sources of excess estrogen.

In your view, is it possible that one day we will have a cure for all cancers?

Although it may be far away in the future, I, with my rose-colored glasses, think it may be possible to find cures for many cancers with the aid of a deeper understanding of how cancer spreads. Technology will also aid our quest for better treatments. The age of affordable and timely genome sequencing is upon us and will enable individual tumor DNA to be analyzed. As personalized medicine becomes a reality in the clinic, we will be able to better match treatment to individuals.

Some people now have a good quality of life after a diagnosis of cancer. There are millions of cancer survivors and living a good quality of life with cancer may be the next best thing to a cure. We have started to become better at preventing cancer (for example by not smoking and vaccination) and also by detecting and treating pre-cancer growths through screening.

Prevention is better than a cure.

Lauren Pecorino was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island, NY. She received her PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Cell and Developmental Biology. She crossed the Atlantic to carry out a postdoctoral tenure at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, London. She is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Greenwich where teaches Cancer Biology and Therapeutics. The teaching of this course motivated her to write The Molecular Biology of Cancer: Mechanisms, Targets, and Therapeutics, now in its second edition. Feedback on the textbook posted on Amazon from a cancer patient drove her to write a book on cancer for a wider audience: Why Millions Survive Cancer: the Successes of Science.

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The article in this week’s Times with the commentary written by Chris Watson illustrates the significant changes that have happened in transplantation over the last two years. In 2008, the Organ Donor Taskforce (ODTF) came up with 14 recommendations to address the problem of donor shortage, and then UK Transplant (which then changed to Blood Transplant) acted upon these.

In addition to these changes, organ donation surgery became restricted to six zones whereas before the ODTF recommendations, all 26 transplant units in the country contributed to cadaveric organ donation. Also, the national sharing of organs (which had been voluntary, in so far as we aimed to serve our own community primarily and additional organs were shared only in certain cases) became enforced. This essentially was because there was a postcode imbalance, and some kidney failure patients waited six years for their transplant whereas in the northeast, patients generally waited only for 18 months.

The reasons for this imbalance were complex and were partly influenced by certain ethnic minority populations who didn’t support cadaveric donation while simultaneously making up a significant percentage of the number of patients who needed a transplant.

Additionally, different transplant unit structures had varying degrees of enthusiasm for donation. The work force obviously recognized these problems and tried to unify the approach and also ensure equality of access.

On a personal level, I was reluctant to throw my lot in with these national developments because our transplant population had a good deal! Indeed, with the national sharing mechanism, our local transplant rates initially fell, resulting in an increased waiting time.

The ODTF 14 point plan was, to me, an experiment which should be abandoned if it didn’t work. However, its effect was to promote donation by embedding Transplant Coordinators in most hospitals, thereby insuring that potential organ donors are not overlooked. In addition, numbers of Non-Heart-beating donors (aka donor after cardiac death), thanks to our pioneering work, have really taken off, accounting for 37% of cadaveric kidney transplants nationally. So although from a local level the national sharing scheme was a bad idea at the time, because of the promotion of donors through the enactment of the ODTF plan, the transplant numbers have now increased nationally, so my concerns for the future have proved wrong.

For example, I was on call for the week between Christmas and New Year and we did six kidneys and two liver transplants. Last week, I was again on call, and we did a liver, a kidney/pancreas, three live donor kidneys, two double kidney transplants, and an islet transplant! On the background of this our unit did 135 cadaveric donors last year.

Our next pressing problem is surgical exhaustion!

David Talbot is a Consultant Transplant Surgeon at Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust and co-author of Organ Donation and Transplantation After Cardiac Death.

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Not one, but two new blog editors! Alice Northover joined the OUPblog in January 2012 as our New York-based Editor-in-Chief. Social Media Manager here at Oxford University Press, you can also find her tweeting @OUPAcademic and Facebooking as Oxford Academic. Prior to joining Oxford, she worked in book publicity, annoyed colleagues about social media, argued semantics, and fantasized about running away to Paris and living as a late 1950s “intello.” Now she can be found wandering aimlessly around New York, obsessing about her cat, and still arguing semantics. And now on to a quick self-interview for you blog readers… –Herself

What book are you reading right now?
I’m reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear? : Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos, which I picked up entirely because I saw the book trailer a few months ago. I’m a bit of a word nerd, which only got worse when I studied French and made a brief attempt at becoming a translator. When you come across a word that stumps you, just stealing that word into English feels incredibly satisfying.

Which word do you have to look up in the dictionary repeatedly?
I can’t remember. Why do you think I have to look it up so much? I’m fairly certain it begins with “p.”

What weird things do you have in your desk drawer?
I haven’t built up a drawer full of weird objects yet, but I do have band aids (“plasters” to our UK readers), lavender hand cream, nail clippers, and some heel inserts. I have two pairs of shoes in my filing cabinet and no files.

What do you look at on the Internet when you think no one’s watching?
I have an irresistible urge to look at slideshows of celebrity dresses after awards ceremonies. I’m very ashamed of this habit.

What’s your favorite bookstore?
A tough decision in New York — we have so many great bookstores. I’ve loved St. Mark’s Bookshop in the Village since my days at NYU. It’s small, friendly, and “curated” as people like to say when justifying the existence of independent bookstores. I’m also very fond of Book Culture on the Upper West Side, my go-to place for esoteric academic titles on Persian military garb or Byzantine political history.

If your friend were visiting NYC, what is the one thing they should do while they are here?
Go for a walk along the High Line, an old elevated freight rail line that has been converted into a public park. Walking among wildflowers while three stories up between (and sometimes under) buildings gives you an entirely different perspective on the city. And it seems crazy, but New Yorkers walk differently on the High Line. They stroll.

Which book-to-movie adaptation did you actually like?
I enjoyed the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Swedish films (haven’t seen the American one yet). One quibble: The second book has a killer closing line; why didn’t they use that in the movie? Also, Gary Oldman should win an Oscar for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Excellent movie and he’s amazing in it!

PS. Look at my cat!

Hawk-eyed OUPblog readers may have noticed a few changes recently and it’s high time we came out with them. May I present UK blog editor Nicola Burton, who joined the UK publicity team at Oxford University Press in August 2011. In addition to her work on OUPblog, Nicola is the publicist for Dictionaries and OUP’s language reference, music and religion trade titles. She also tweets @OUPAcademic, @OEDonline and @OxfordWords. In previous years, Nicola could be found working in technology PR, drinking in East London pubs, and globetrotting with an overly large pink backpack. She is now mostly to be found in charity shops satisfying her button-buying habit. And now on to our Q&A… –Alice

What’s your favourite word?
This changes regularly, but at the moment I’m a fan of abbreviating words à la The Only Way Is Essex. For instance, “Don’t be ridic, I’m well jel! That party was totes amaze.” There’s a great blog post on Sentence First about this phenomenon.

What is your favourite fiction book?
It’d be impossible to pick one for all time, so instead I’ll share my favourite fiction read of 2011: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I was fascinated by the destructive propensity of the narrator’s psyche to perpetuate a self-constructed ideal with which she compares and berates herself.

What weird things do you have in your desk drawer right now?
Some steel wool, artist’s fixative spray, and a stack of Oxford World’s Classics’ Kamasutra postcards . Do I need to expand further?

Name three acceptable bribes that potential guest bloggers could send you.
Buttons, pearls, and Hendrick’s gin are incredibly acceptable forms of bribery.

What’s your favorite animal?
The ladybird [Ed: known as a "ladybug" to Americans]. They have a propitious habit of unexpectedly rocking up when I’m feeling undecided or generally woebegone, so I’ve become convinced they are my lucky talismans.

What’s your most obscure talent/hobby?
Something I can only describe as ‘button art’ – using mixed vintage and modern buttons to create mosaics and decorate accessories. Here’s one I made earlier…

What’s the longest book you’ve ever read?
Without researching word counts, I guess it would either be A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, or Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. Both effortlessly seduced me through to their last pages.

Fill in the blank: I’m chuffed to be the OUPblog editor because it is _________
…Without a doubt the best academic blog EVER, brimming over with insightful content I actually enjoy reading, and offering me the inspiring privilege of working with so many wonderful authors and academics worldwide.

February 2, 1536

Buenos Aires First Founded

On February 2, 1536, Spanish explorer Pedro de Mendoza founded the city he named Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Aire—Buenos Aires, Argentina. The new town was meant to spearhead the Spanish effort to colonize the interior of South America. It came less than two years after conquistadors had returned to Spain from Peru with treasures seized from the Inca empire.

Spain’s Charles I was spurred by the vast Inca wealth to seek further riches in South America. He also wanted to block any effort by Portugal to expand its foothold in Brazil. Accordingly, he commissioned Mendoza to mount an expedition to explore and settle the Río de la Plata, a vast estuary in southern South America that had been sighted back in 1516.

Mendoza set out in August 1535 in command of 800 to 1700 men (accounts vary) in around a dozen ships. The expedition — the largest sent from Spain to the Americas to date — was ill fated, however. A fierce storm blew the ships off course, and after regrouping Mendoza decided that one of his lieutenants was a rebel and had him executed. Troubles continued after the founding of Buenos Aires. At first the Spaniards received gifts of food from the indigenous locals but soon after fighting broke out between the two groups. That conflict cut off the chief source of food, and the Spaniards began to starve. Mendoza sent a lieutenant upriver in search of a friendlier site. He founded Asunción, now the capital of Paraguay.

Mendoza himself headed back to Spain in 1537. He was seriously ill — perhaps from syphilis — and died on the return trip. His settlement continued to struggle, and in 1541 the remaining colonists abandoned it, heading for Asunción. Not until 1580, when Juan de Garay returned to the scene, was a permanent Spanish presence established at Buenos Aires.

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A grown-up neighbor in the English village of my childhood told stories about angels that sat upon our shoulders and fairies that lived in her snapdragons. Like the other kids, I searched her flowers for a glimpse of the sprites, but agnosticism imbibed from my parents quickly overruled this innocent play. Yet there was magic in my neighbor’s garden and I had seen real angels on her lawn: little stalked bells that poked from the dew-drenched grass on autumn mornings; evanescent beauties whose delicately balanced caps quivered to the touch. By afternoon they were gone, shriveled into the greenery. Does any living thing seem more supernatural to a child than a mushroom? Their prevalence in fairy tale illustrations and fantasy movies suggests not. Like no other species, the strangeness of fungi survives the loss of innocence about the limits of nature. They trump the supernatural, their magic intensifying as we learn more about them.

Once upon a time, I spent 30 years studying mushrooms and other fungi. Now, as my scientific interests broaden with my waistline, I would like to share three things that I have learned about the meaning of life from thinking about these extraordinary sex organs and the microbes that produce them. This mycological inquiry has revealed the following: (i) life on land would collapse without the activities of mushrooms; (ii) we owe our existence to mushrooms; and (iii) there is (probably) no God. The logic is spotless.

Mushrooms are masterpieces of natural engineering. The overnight appearance of the fruit body is a pneumatic process, with the inflation of millions of preformed cells extending the stem, pushing earth aside, and unfolding the cap. Once exposed, the gills of a meadow mushroom shed an astonishing 30,000 spores per second, delivering billions of allergenic particles into the air every day. A minority of spores alights and germinates on fertile ground and some species are capable of spawning the largest and longest-lived organisms on the planet. Mushroom colonies burrow through soil and rotting wood. Some hook into the roots of forest trees and engage in mutually supportive symbioses; others are pathogens that decorate their food sources with hardened hooves and fleshy shelves. Mushrooms work with insects too, fed by and feeding leaf-cutter ants in the New World and termites in the Old World. Among the staggering diversity of mushroom-forming fungi we also find strange apparitions including gigantic puffballs, phallic eruptions with revolting aromas, and tiny “bird’s nests” whose spore-filled eggs are splashed out by raindrops.

Mushrooms have been around for tens of millions of years and their activities are indispensable for the operation of the biosphere. Through their relationships with plants and animals, mushrooms are essential for forest and grassland ecology, climate control and atmospheric chemistry, water purification, and the maintenance of biodiversity. This first point, about the ecological significance of mushrooms, is obvious, yet the 16,000 described species of mushroom-forming fungi are members of the most poorly understood kingdom of life. The second point requires a dash of lateral thinking. Because humans evolved in ecosystems dependent upon mushrooms there would be no us without mushrooms. And no matter how superior we feel, humans remain dependent upon the continual activity of these fungi. The relationship isn’t reciprocal: without us there would definitely be mushrooms. Judged against the rest of life (and, so often, we do place ourselves against the rest of nature) humans can be considered as a recent and damaging afterthought.

Some people may find my third point more controversial. Mushrooms demonstrate, quite convincingly, that gods are figments of the hominid imagination. Carefully designed experiments with psilocybin, the hallucinogenic alkaloid from species of Psilocybe mushroom, show that spiritual feelings of kinship with something greater than oneself, mystical experiences, and other nebulous phenomena can be induced by this single chemical. Participants treated with psilocybin in a recent study at Johns Hopkins University described feeling closer to God. After ingestion, psilocybin is converted into psilocin. Psilocin is remarkably similar in chemical structure to serotonin and when it reaches the brain it docks with serotonin receptors, upsets the normal functioning of the neocortex, and can conjure deities from thin air. Belief in God has no more substance than a mushroom dream.

To sum up: life on earth depends on mushrooms, humans wouldn’t have evolved without mushrooms, and mushrooms afford formidable support for the nonexistence of God. That we are manufactured from stardust, rescued from disorder by the big reactor in the sky, and destined to diffusion, is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And while mushrooms are everywhere and will outlive us by an eternity, what marvelous and unlikely fortune to be alive at this moment!

Nicholas Money is Professor of Botany and Western Program Director at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of more than 70 peer-reviewed papers on fungal biology and has authored four books, including, Mr. Bloomfield’s Orchard. The Mysterious World of Mushrooms, Molds, and Mycologists (2002), and Mushroom which published in January 2012. As Director of Miami’s interdisciplinary Western Program, Dr. Money has broadened his professional interests and is examining the power of the scientific process to shape our comprehension of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything else.

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February 1, 2009

Iceland’s Sigurðardóttir Becomes the First Openly Gay World Leader

On February 1, 2009, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir made double history: she became the first woman to serve as Iceland’s prime minister and she became the first openly gay person to become leader of any nation.

Sigurðardóttir’s rise to the premiership resulted from several factors. She had a long career in politics and was the longest-serving member of the Iceland’s parliament, the Althing, having first been elected in 1978. She also had experience in government positions, serving four times as Minister of Social Affairs, overseeing Iceland’s social welfare programs. Sigurðardóttir was a member of Iceland’s middle class, working as both a flight attendant and an office worker before entering politics. Her understanding of the basic concerns of ordinary people appealed to many Icelanders.

The other factor contributing to her achievement was Iceland’s economic mess. The island nation’s banking industry collapsed in 2008 and 2009. That crisis brought down the conservative government of Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde and caused Icelanders to favor the leftist views of the socialist Sigurðardóttir.

Two years after taking office, her government seems to have stabilized Iceland’s economy. Inflation had been surging above 18 percent a year at the end of 2008, just before she took office. By 2011, it had fallen under 4 percent. The growth rate of the nation’s gross domestic product, which had been negative in 2009 and 2010, in the wake of the economic collapse, was expected to reach 2.5 percent in 2011. The banking sector has been overhauled.

Success was not complete, however. Icelandic voters rejected a government-backed plan to reimburse British and Dutch depositors in Icelandic banks for lost deposits. Voters also seem not to favor Sigurðardóttir’s desire to enter the European Union.

Sigurðardóttir did enjoy a great personal moment from her premiership. When Iceland’s new law that allowed gay marriage took effect in June 2010, she married her longtime partner Jónína Leósdóttir, a writer.

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We are failing to deal with one of the most important issues of our time – in every country we are getting fatter. Although being fat is not automatically linked to illness, it does increase dramatically the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other so-called non-communicable diseases. We are starting to see very high rates of these diseases in some places, sometimes affecting 50% of the population. Even in some of the poorest parts of the developing world, where such disease itself is not yet common, we nonetheless see warning signs of its arrival. There is great concern that it may soon outweigh the burden of communicable disease such as HIV/AIDS. The humanitarian and financial cost of this non-communicable disease in such parts of the world will be unbearable, and made even worse because the risk is passed across generations, so children born today and tomorrow will have a bleak future.

It seems that we don’t know how to tackle this problem, because current attempts are obviously failing and obesity continues to increase. Governments, doctors, and even NGOs seem to have adopted the same strategy – to focus on our sins of “gluttony and sloth” and to transfer the responsibility for slimming down to each of us as individuals. Of course it’s true that we can’t get overweight unless we eat more than we need to, and the wrong types of foods, and get too little physical exercise. Our biology did not evolve to protect us from obesity and its consequences in today’s sedentary world with such easy access to food. But why is it that we find it so hard to lose weight and, if we do shed the kilos, it seems very hard not to put them back on again?

What we are missing is a focus on our early development. We’re just not adopting the right approach to the problem. And it seems that the generals who are leading us in this global war on obesity and disease have adopted the wrong strategy, and they stick resolutely to it as if they were wearing blinkers. They blame us for the failure to win the war, for our greed and laziness; they blame parents for letting their children get fat; they blame the food industry for peddling unhealthy food, and so on. As if we choose to be fat. It’s important to realise just how limited this way of attacking the problem is on a global scale. Does the little girl force-fed before marriage in Mauritania have any choice in her life? Does the 12-year-old child bride in rural India have any choice when she becomes pregnant and drops out of school? Does the little toddler in Detroit have any choice when his mother feeds him French fries? Does the little boy from Tonga whose mother had diabetes in pregnancy have any choice about developing obesity? Does the little girl in Beijing have any choice in being an only child? And yet every one of these scenarios, and many more, sets that little child up to be at greater risk of becoming obese and to have non-communicable disease.

But new research is uncovering many things that will give us new tactics and strategies for the war against obesity and non-communicable disease, and so we’re hopeful. We now know that we will have to give much greater focus to the mother and unborn child. We may well have to give emphasis to the lifestyle of the father as well. And most importantly of all, we’re starting to realise that behaviours such as propensity to exercise, or appetite and taste for certain foods, which we previously thought to be based on individual choice, have a large constitutional component – in part based on inherited genes, in part on epigenetic changes to gene function in response to the developmental environment, and in part through early learning. If we focus on our early development, and in promoting health in parents even before they conceive a child, we can help both them and the next generation to avoid obesity and disease. We don’t have to accept this as our fate.

We now face a world where more people suffer from apparent over-nutrition rather than under-nutrition. But paradoxically both can lead to chronic disease. We may be better to think of unbalanced nutrition, nutrition mismatched to our evolved biology, and affecting much of the world’s population. These issues are growing in the developing world. When combined with climate change, issues of water, food and energy security, changes in longevity, family size and infectious disease, they will make a “perfect storm.” Weathering this storm will require the combined effort not just of health professionals and scientists, but of governments, agencies, foundations, and the private sector.

Prof Mark Hanson is the UK’s leading researcher on developmental pathways to disease. He is current President of the International Society for the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. He has served on WHO committees and chairs an advisory committee in China focused on the diabetes epidemic. In the UK he directs the Division of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease at the University of Southampton, and overseas he holds visiting appointments in Auckland, Singapore, Dublin and Shanghai. Alongside Prof Sir Peter Gluckman, Mark Hanson co-authored Fat, Fate and Disease: Why excercise and diet are not enough, which published this month in the UK. It publishes in the US in March 2012.

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The Republican establishment is stepping up its attacks against Gingrich. It was coordinated today from a variety of quarters: Bob Dole, Peter Wehner, Tom Delay, William Buckley Jr., and Anne Coulter.

Photo by Gage Skidmore. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The fact that a coordinated strategy against Gingrich is happening within party ranks conveniently on the eve of the last debate before the Florida primary is particularly striking given that Gingrich doesn’t really have a fall back plan beyond Florida. Romney took a landslide victory in Nevada, the next state up in the primary calendar, back in 2008, so it is difficult to imagine that Gingrich would be able to pull an upset there, or in Arizona or Michigan on February 28.

But everything changes if Gingrich wins in Florida. Then the momentum will keep him going until Super Tuesday on March 6 when the South speaks and Gingrich will rise; and civil war will erupt in the Republican party. The Establishment will do everything to thwart him there, and that is why they are taking no chances and are already making headway. Mitt Romney’s superior debate performance tonight was also a reflection of a campaign in full knowledge that the Florida firewall must not fall.

A few days after the President’s State of the Union address, hardly anyone is talking about it because Obama’s fate in November will depend more on forces he cannot control than on anything he can do. Every single poll out there placing Gingrich and Obama in a head-to-head match gives the election to Obama — by a 12 point spread on average. If the Republican primary electorate delivers Gingrich to Obama, even Bob Dole and William Buckley think it’s going to be four more years.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.

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Photo by Gage Skidmore. Source: Wikipedia

Volatility, though, has been the hallmark of the nomination race this year, and there is no reason to think this will change. The higher quantity of debates has helped Gingrich build a momentum in the last week — as has his superPAC — and both are new developments from the last cycle. For the first time in modern history, the Republicans have picked a different winner for each of the first three states. For the first time ever, the Republicans are going to nominate either a Mormon (Romney) or a Catholic (Gingrich). This denominational diversity reveals a conservative electorate much more concerned about the economy than about social values, which was the major issue just eight years ago. Finally, the loyal supporters of Ron Paul are a wild card, because no one knows to whom they will turn when Paul finally bows out — and he intends to to hang around. All told, there are 1150 delegates to get to earn the nomination, so this race pushes on at least until the Spring.

Gingrich did not win in South Carolina because of “electability” as the SC exit polls misleadingly say; he won because of the rage that South Carolinians believe is necessary to take on Obama. Gingrich received the first standing ovation in the debates so far when he observed that more people had been put on food stamps under Obama than under any other president – a line he has been repeating in the last week. Obama will not and cannot receive credit for whatever he has done because his very presence in the White House is perceived by some conservatives as a criminalization of the the state in the service of socialism. This newly rediscovered “southern strategy” worked in South Carolina and it may well work beyond.

Gingrich is in a good position but not a front-leading one, however. He will not enjoy the native-son-of-the-South advantage in Florida as he did in South Carolina, so the next contest is going to be important for him to prove his viability. He would need a huge infusion of cash to be able to afford the television ads he or his superPAC will need to run in Florida. Gingrich won’t be able to sustain his momentum with just the free media, though the two debates last week will help. For now, Romney still enjoys a lead because Florida’s electorate is older and less evangelical than in South Carolina. Early voting has already started in Florida, and will continue until the 28th, so Romney’s initial lead there would help him.

It is also worth noting that Romney is the only candidate who has done well in all three states. He is still, therefore, the frontrunner. But he cannot afford any more mis-steps. The tax returns questions from the media was just poorly handled, and Romney has stuttered repeatedly on a question for which he should have been more than prepared (as Gingrich was about ABC’s interview with his ex-wife). Romney’s fundamental problem, paradoxically, is that he is a happy, privileged man. He has no axe to grind, no grievances — not even with the liberals and the feds. Worse still, he doesn’t even perform anger very well, and that is why he could not gain traction in South Carolina. Romney is going to have to go after Gingrich’s ethics violations, Fannie and Freddie Mac associations, and his multiple marriages; while Gingrich is going to go after Romney’s Bain history, his healthcare positions in Massachusetts, and his tax returns. Things will have to get much uglier before the results of the nomination contest become clearer. And so onward toward the Sunshine State we go.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.

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Has the Washington foreign policy establishment disavowed democracy in the Middle East? According to Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald the answer is a resounding yes. Greenwald, a lawyer by training and blogger/author by trade, has long been a trenchant critic of various “establishments.” In addition to “America’s national security priesthood,” he has often skewered the mainstream media for various transgressions such as giving the George W. Bush administration a pass on the invasion of Iraq and more recently for giving Luke Russert and Chelsea Clinton high-profile jobs. Greenwald’s work on post-9/11 domestic policies, especially the way the Bush administration and a complicit Congress compromised civil liberties through dubious laws like the USA Patriot Act is among the best there is out there. Yet on those occasions when he has wandered into foreign policy, Greenwald’s commentary is considerably less original.

In his January 2 column, Greenwald went after CSIS’s Jon Alterman for an oped he published in the December 31 New York Times. Alterman had been an election observer in Egypt during the second round of polls. In about 80 words he relayed what he saw, including large numbers of voters turning out for either the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party or the al-Nour Party, which is affiliated with one strand of the Egyptian Salafist movement. Alterman, who spent three years living in Egypt in the 1990s, suggests that the best outcome in terms of American interests would be “a balance” between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and Egypt’s new politicians. The implication being, I think, that the military would retain control over important foreign policy issues like the bilateral relationships with the United States and Israel while ceding executive authority in other areas to elected civilians.

Being well…I guess… part of the foreign policy establishment by dint of my employment, it is hard to understand how Greenwald extrapolates from Alterman’s oped that Washington foreign policy establishment has collectively decided that democracy in the Middle East is bad for the United States. A few observations before I move on: 1) people outside of Washington often make claims about Washington that they would never make about anywhere else. Greenwald is a smart guy. He surely knows that the so-called foreign policy elite is a diverse group. Indeed, there are many varieties of species in this zoo, 2) I don’t know whom Greenwald has been reading, but I count exactly two people who have warned that democratic development in the Middle East is bad for U.S. interests—Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and Greg Gause, professor of political science at the University of Vermont. Greenwald suggests his two primary bugaboos: Israelis and neocons. He is surely correct about the Israelis who prefer to make deals with regional authoritarians whom they hope can keep a lid on public sentiment, but he has got the neocons wrong. (By the way, in order to make his claim that “many neocons” oppose democracy in the Arab world, Greenwald cites a February 2, 2011 piece—nine days before Hosni Mubarak fell—in The Forward that only references David Wurmser and Malcolm Hoenlein , hardly a representative sampling.) Take the Egypt Working Group, a bipartisan group that which includes leading neocon personalities like my colleague, Elliott Abrams, and the Brookings Institutions’ Robert Kagan. Neither the Group nor Abrams nor Kagan have wavered in their support for democratic change in Egypt.

The jaundiced views of folks like Gelb and Gause does not make either of them democracy haters, though. It seems to me that they are onto something that few people took into consideration during the heady days of last winter, myself included. It has been an article of faith among many observers that more democratic countries in the Middle East will ultimately be better allies of the United States. Maybe. This is actually more of a hunch based on what people hope will happen in the long run than a reasoned analysis based on either historical precedent or the political dynamics of region. The emergence of a new kind of politics in the Arab world in which public opinion matters in new and important ways, revolutionary narratives about what has ailed countries the past and the best solutions for the future, as well as politicians seeking to establish their nationalist bona fides strongly suggests that in the short run (might I remind that the long run is made up of lots of short runs) Washington is going to have a tough time in the Middle East.

Greenwald seems to think that Washington has a special allergy to the accumulation of Islamist political power conveniently forgetting the Islamists who run Turkey or the Wahhabist worldview that undergirds Saudi Arabia or the fact that policymakers saw the writing on the wall relatively quickly after Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak fell and dropped official prohibitions on interaction with the Muslim Brotherhood. Still, the changes that are coming in the Middle East are not a function of Islamism per se, but rather politics. It would be rather un-pragmatic politically of the vaunted pragmatists of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to renounce its long-held position that the United States has played a malevolent role in Egypt and the Arab world more generally. The Brothers are not alone, however. Everyone in Egypt has sought to leverage the moment of national empowerment and dignity that the January 25th uprising represents to their political benefit and the strategic relationship between Mubarak’s Egypt and Washington is a juicy target.

Given U.S. interests—the free flow of oil from the Middle East, helping to ensure Israeli security, and preventing any other power from dominating the region—and the changes presently underway in the Arab world, foreign policy analysts would be remiss not to point out that there are potential downsides to democratic development in the region. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and others helped create a regional order that made it relatively easier and less expensive to pursue its interests in the Middle East. That era has come to an end and it is likely to be costly to the U.S. The good news for Greenwald and everyone else is that there is nothing Washington can do about it. There will be no Operation Egyptian Freedom. American foreign policy, in order to be successful, is going to have to take stock of the changes in the region and adjust. There is every indication that the national security priesthood actually understands this and is now groping to develop a new approach to the region, though much of U.S. policy will depend on political outcomes in the Middle East and not what is written in the oped pages or said at Washington, DC foreign policy roundtables.

This article appears courtesy of CFR.

Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A leading expert on Arab and Turkish politics, he is author of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.

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