Dubai

Dubai is a clever blend of audacity and architecture, a shiny monument to the egos and ambition that turned a tiny emirate into a Middle East financial giant. Russian oligarchs stroll along man-made islands shaped like palm trees, and sheiks race down a ski slope built inside a shopping mall.

Lacking the oil reserves of the emirate's neighbors, Dubai's ruling family created a parallel economic reality fueled by real estate, international investment and the art of the possible. The emirate was fashioned into a sleek cityscape of startling images: Islam balanced against the seduction of Western capitalism, and tribal traditions brushing the fleeting trends of globalization.

Cranes like countless arms moved across a skyline that grew more crowded by the day, if not the hour. The world's tallest building went up, highways looped through the desert, the airport never closed. Dubai expanded into a commerce crossroads for Asia, Europe and America, a place of cigar salons, horse races, a seven-star hotel and suitcases full of money.

And then boom went bust.

The global recession has left Dubai with miles of office space it can't rent and reams of contracts it can't honor. Thousands of foreign engineers, architects, bankers and laborers have been sent home. Like everything else that has epitomized Dubai for the last decade, even its debt is staggering: An estimated $80 billion, with nearly $60 billion of it held by Dubai World, a conglomerate of a number of state-controlled businesses.

News that Dubai wanted to suspend payments on its debt shook worldwide financial markets last week. It is unclear what impact will be felt when trading opens today. Stock exchanges in Dubai and across much of the Middle East were closed Sunday during a Muslim holiday.

Dubai is one of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, a nation wedged between the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. The UAE's Central Bank has offered emergency support to banks with holdings in Dubai. The neighboring emirate, Abu Dhabi, which has rich oil reserves, is expected to offer a limited rescue to keep the crisis contained.

"I wouldn't expect big damage," said Joe Kawkabani, managing director of asset management for Algebra Capital in Dubai. "The dynamics in Saudi, Qatar, Abu Dhabi are very different than the dynamics in Dubai. They have much richer economies, they have oil and sovereign wealth funds that can support them even during a recession, and they have nowhere near the amount of debt as Dubai."

Apartment and office prices tumbled across the Emirates in 2008. An estimated 400 building and real estate projects valued at $300 billion reportedly have been put on hold throughout the country. There are fears that debt and weakened investor confidence will hit British banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC, which are large creditors to Dubai and the rest of the UAE.

Collapsing real estate values were not the visions of Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, whose goal was to build an international city that would echo the grandeur of centuries past, when Baghdad and other capitals symbolized the power of the Islamic world. After Dubai emerged from British control in 1971, its ruling family quickly turned to finance, opening an airport, creating free trade zones and reaching into regional markets.

Maktum, a poet and an equestrian, was guiding much of the development before he was named ruler in 2006. His book, "My Vision," urged other countries to follow Dubai's success. But to his critics, including some in the Abu Dhabi royal family, Maktum was brash and reckless, overdeveloping and leveraging his emirate against the whims of global markets.

The emirate's architecture, with buildings that billowed like sails or twirled in delicate angles, personified the rising confidence and influence of Persian Gulf nations. Dubai's style challenged Arab world stalwarts such as Egypt and attracted a younger generation of Arab professionals from filmmakers to accountants.

"Dubai created a lot of envy in its neighbors," said Randa Habib, a Jordanian political analyst. "Maybe the development was a bit too risky, a bit too crazy, but everyone would agree that they need the dream of Dubai to continue. It was the first Arab city that proved to the world that it could compare to a Western city with its buildings and its vision. It raised a point of pride."

And it drew a wave of new languages. About 85% of Dubai's population of 1.7 million are from other countries, including about 250,000 construction workers, most of them from India and elsewhere in Asia. Human rights organizations have criticized Dubai for the low wages and poor living conditions offered workers, and for turning a blind eye to prostitution networks that discreetly serve tourists, bricklayers and tycoons.

Loose oversight and light bureaucracy allowed money to flit in and out of banks and investment houses with little scrutiny. Al Qaeda and the Taliban, along with drug smugglers and gunrunners, have laundered money in Dubai's financial institutions, according to U.S. investigators. In recent years, international pressure has forced the emirate to tighten regulations.

Dubai's carefully calibrated cultural tolerance also is facing pressure from religious conservatives who believe it is jeopardizing its soul and traditions. This tension was highlighted in the 2008 trial of an unmarried British couple found guilty of public drinking and indecency for having sex on a beach. The case was as much about cultural boundaries as it was about the dangers of Dubai's freewheeling capitalism.

The debt crisis has sent people scrambling, Kawkabani said.

"No one is saying it's the end of Dubai . . . but if this is not handled properly it could be damaging to its reputation with investors and creditors," he said.

Dubai, like General Motors, is too big not to rescue, said an editorial in the National, an Abu Dhabi newspaper.

"We should recall that it was only on June 1 that General Motors, itself once the crown jewel of American industry, sought protection from its creditors," the newspaper said. "Many feared that the firm, whose chief executive once boasted that 'What is good for General Motors is good for America,' would cease making cars altogether. It emerged anew in July, streamlined and firing on all cylinders. . . . But nobody should expect a quick turnaround. Confidence is a fragile commodity."

Gelertner

On a Wednesday afternoon in late October, David Gelernter is seated at the head of a green Formica table in a small classroom in Arthur K. Watson Hall on the campus of Yale University, where he is a professor of computer science. "Can you know something you don't know you know?" he asks the small group of students enrolled in a course called "Computer Science and the Modern Intellectual Agenda," which, according to the syllabus, explores how cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind can distinguish "seeming from being" and locate "a man's (or your own) identity."

An hour before class, Gelernter—technological guru, conservative polemicist, Unabomber target—had tried to locate his own identity. "I'm a misfit," he said. "Most people fit in a groove and focus on one thing, but I cut across the grain of different areas." In conversation, the eclecticism of Gelernter's mind is immediately apparent. An opinionated raconteur, he seamlessly transitions from literary criticism ("Deconstructionists destroy texts"), to trends in the art world ("Modern museums are devoted to diversity as opposed to greatness"), gender roles ("Women mainly work because of male greed"), contemporary politics ("Anti-Semitism in Europe is so intense that, I think, Hitler would have an easier time today then he did in 1933"), and earthier topics ("I am obsessed with sex and sexuality as much as anyone I have ever met").

Gelernter, a plump man with dark curly hair and a stringy beard, occupies a unique spot in American intellectual life, at the intersection of technology, art, politics, and religion. Yale University Press just published his latest book, Judaism: A Way of Being, a sweeping meditation on Jewish spirituality and belief. His career, he says, has not adhered to the "standard academic chalk lines." In 1979, as a 23-year-old graduate student, he began writing a landmark programming language that enabled multiple computers to work simultaneously on a single problem. (He named it Linda, in honor of Linda Lovelace, star of the 1972 pornographic movie Deep Throat.) In 1991, Oxford University Press published his Mirror Worlds, or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox—How it Will Happen and What It Will Mean, which imagined a time when people would be able to peer at their computer screens and see reality. Today, Gelernter is widely credited with having anticipated the rise of the Internet. His reputation as a doyen of digital culture was cemented by the publication of Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (Free Press, 1994) and Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology (Basic Books, 1997).

"It was wonderfully ego-boosting to become well known in computer science, but my interests were always drawing, painting, reading, and writing," Gelernter says. "I was being irresponsible to my own artistic responsibilities." He speaks amid the toppled stacks of paper, empty cans of diet soda, and haphazard piles of books that clutter his corner office. As he talks, he occasionally worries the Velcro strap on the black-and-white glove he wears on his right hand, the most visible reminder of the day in 1993 when he was almost killed by a mail bomb sent by the Unabomber.

Gelernter was emboldened by his brush with mortality. He loathes the idea of victimhood. To be a victim, he says, is "to define yourself in terms of what some random thug did to you. I would never sink so low as that." Says Leon R. Kass, the bioethicist and University of Chicago professor, "David is not embittered by the Unabomber attack. He doesn't walk around feeling sorry for himself. On the contrary, it seems to have energized him to make absolutely the most out of every grain of talent and power that he has." Neal Kozodoy, a former editor of Commentary magazine and a friend of Gelernter, says that after the attack, "David entered into the most creative period of his life. Everything became much more urgent to him."

While convalescing from the bombing, which tore apart his right hand, damaged his right eye and ear, and severely lacerated his abdomen and chest, Gelernter researched and wrote 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (Free Press, 1995). Described in The New York Times as "part fiction, part history, part sociology, and part prophecy," the book begins by rhapsodizing on the sensation of "acute hope" that suffused the 1939 New York World's Fair (the theme was "The World of Tomorrow") and ends with a lament on the crushing pessimism of our own time. In between, Gelernter weaves the fictional account of a young couple's experience at the fair. (Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone, has optioned the book, and Hanks called Gelernter to discuss turning it into a film. "They're crazy if they don't," Gelernter says. "It would be a great movie.")

Enlarge PhotoKen Lovell, Yale Digital Media Center for the Arts“Ashrei,” by David Gerlernter
1939 sent a clear signal that Gelernter was intent on branching out in new directions. He has established himself as a writer of fiction, a painter, a cultural critic, and a political essayist, regularly contributing to The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary and, for a while, writing a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times. His writings have touched on wide variety of issues, including the demise of romantic love in a culture where sex has "developed the moral significance of an ATM transaction on a street corner," and the legacy of Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister, who, Gelernter argues, is the "inventor of modern conservatism."

Gelernter's own politics are conservative, even, he says, "extreme right-wing" on some issues. He is scornful of feminism, about which he plainly relishes making provocative pronouncements. In a much-discussed 1996 essay in Commentary, "Why Mothers Should Stay Home," he claimed that working mothers were harming their children. In recent years, Gelernter has emerged as the chief exponent of what he calls "Americanism," a set of beliefs "that make Americans positive that their nation is superior to all others—morally superior, closer to God." Gelernter, 54, says he grew up in a liberal family but suffered a "moral crisis" as a result of America's retreat from Vietnam. That "betrayal" still haunts him. The specter of thousands of Vietnamese fleeing into rickety rowboats to escape Ho Chi Minh's dictatorship, he says, was a "pivotal political moment" in his life. He says he knew that entering the arena of opinion journalism was "poison": "I would have loved to have been above the battle. All my friends and teachers were liberals, and all you do when you publish a political piece is make enemies." Coming out as a conservative, he adds, also meant that his childhood dream of being published in The New Yorker was over.

Instead Gelernter has found an intellectual home at Commentary, where his latest cross-disciplinary incursion, Judaism, took shape as a series of essays titled "Judaism Beyond Words." Judaism is a visual tour of Jewish life, an attempt to conjure "the grand scheme" of the Jewish religion. It is perhaps Gelernter's most ambitious work to date. The slender book, which includes several glossy reprints of Gelernter's paintings, is structured around a series of images that shade into themes, which in turn, he writes, coalesce "into the richly reverberant, soaring architecture of Judaism." That somewhat amorphous premise is placed in the service of a characteristically extravagant goal: to, in Gelernter's words, answer "the great questions of human existence."

Judaism marks a return of sort for the author, who began work on a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible at Yale but left to study Talmud at a yeshiva in New York. The book's reception, says Kass, will be an interesting test. "Will David the computer scientist make an impact as a man who 100 years ago would have been a rabbi?"

When, shortly before 8 a.m. on June 24, 1993, Gelernter opened a book-size package in his office on the fifth floor of Watson Hall, he thought it was a dissertation. It was a nail-laden bomb. Shirtless, bleeding profusely, he ran to a health clinic more than a block away. When he arrived he had no blood pressure.

"A man who has been blown up by a bomb is a mess," Gelernter wrote in his memoir, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (Free Press, 1997). During a six-week hospitalization, he endured several operations: reconstructive surgery on his hand, skin grafts on his torso, and, much later, a corneal transplant that restored partial vision in his right eye. His body was devastated—he has described his chest as a "gouged-out construction site"—but his mind was sharp and frantic.

"As I lay in the intensive-care unit, having almost died, I was filled with enormous remorse for the things I hadn't painted," he recalls from a paint-flecked blue leather chair in the living room of his house, where Gelernter lives with his wife, Jane, and two college-aged sons. Large tin buckets full of paintbrushes are scattered around the room. "I thought to myself: You knew you were an important painter, a major painter, but you threw it away." For a moment, Gelernter falls silent. "There is nothing worse than remorse," he says slowly, running his finger along the lip of an American-flag coffee mug.

Physical therapists told him that his left hand would develop new abilities to compensate for his injuries. "I didn't believe them," he says flatly. Gradually, though, he relearned to paint and draw. "I have resolved to never put down the paintbrush again," he says, turning his gaze to a bright-red painting on the wall in front of him. At the center of the canvas are green Hebrew letters that spell out Ashrei (a central prayer in Judaism and the Hebrew word for "happy") and a red butterfly. Butterflies are prominent in many of his paintings. "The butterfly is nature's own abstract art," Gelernter says. His affection for butterflies, however, also has to do with his love for Vladimir Nabokov, who was a lepidopterist. "I own a collection of his lepidopterology writings," he says, gesturing at the floor-to-ceiling wood bookcases that line the room. The shelves are overfull—William Blake, Kierkegaard, Ian McEwan, Tolstoy, John Updike, and countless books on artists: Degas, Jasper Johns, Gustav Klimt, Matisse, and more and more and more. "What ties my work together," Gelernter continues, "is that it begins as an image dancing around in my head." He walks up to "Ashrei," which hangs above a giant mantle. (The painting appears on the cover of Judaism.) "I am trying to invoke a spiritual aura," he says, almost to himself. "Because I have always thought in images, it was natural for me to fasten on to the fact that Jewish literature, especially the Bible, is explosively visual."

In Judaism, Gelernter zeroes in on four "image-themes"—separation, veil, perfect asymmetry, and inward pilgrimage. "Imagine yourself in an amphitheater," he writes, "gazing down at a stage on which shapes appear and sometimes blend together." He goes on to discuss how the Red Sea parts to allow the Israelites to escape Egypt (separation), Abraham strides atop Mount Moriah with his son Isaac by his side (inward pilgrimage), Moses returns from his meeting with God with his luminous face obscured by a shroud (veil), and the biblical figures of Jacob and Rachel, side by side, in love (perfect asymmetry). "Imagery is natural to Judaism," Gelernter says, his fleshy face lighting up with excitement. "Jews have always pondered the beauty of the aleph bet"—the Hebrew alphabet—"so it is natural for art and images to emerge, which can communicate much more than a description in language."

Judaism is a strange book. Gelernter's stock-in-trade flourishes are present—captured between the two covers, he writes, is "Judaism at full strength, straight up; no water, no soda, aged in oak for three thousand years"—but the book is also a deeply lyrical, even sensual, accounting of Gelernter's own faith. "He is clearly convinced that he has discovered a truth that is available nowhere else, and he is celebrating it," says David Novak, a professor of the study of religion and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Gelernter, however, casts his deeply personal argument in universal terms as a "common Judaism" (he borrows the term from Israeli scholars) whose "beauties and animating principles can be recognized and (with qualifications) agreed to by all."

Not surprising, there is much disagreement. David Biale, a professor of history at the University of California at Davis, takes exception to the very idea that Judaism can be boiled down to an essence. He calls that an antiquated notion with a long pedigree. "These sorts of books were a cottage industry a hundred years ago," he says. Their aim, in part, was tribal boosterism, an attempt to show that Judaism was a modern, even liberal tradition. "But," Biale says, "there was also a genuine intellectual conviction that Judaism could be reduced to a set of beliefs." Such a view, he adds, has largely been abandoned by contemporary scholars, who tend to regard Judaism as a complex, contradictory phenomenon.

In addition, Biale detects a "kind of chutzpah" in Gelernter's writings on Judaism. Take, for example, a short essay titled, "What Makes Judaism the Most Important Intellectual Development in Western History," which appears as an appendix in Judaism and argues that "the best ideas we possess come straight from Judaism." Gelernter acknowledges that such a view is likely to provoke. "But," he writes, "too many people have developed (in the name of tolerance) the habit of declining to say who or what is 'best' or 'most important' in any human endeavor—which shows not tolerance but laziness." Biale is unconvinced. "We need this sort of triumphalism like a hole in the head these days," he says.

Others are more sympathetic. James E. Ponet, head of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, hails Judaism as "a magnificent credo." Novak views Gelernter's intervention into Jewish studies as a positive development "because it challenges scholars in the field to be less stodgy." Franz Rosenzweig, one of the great Jewish philosophers of the last century, Novak notes, was himself an outsider. "Such people have insights that scholars in the field don't have. They challenge the deadening professionalism that can affect any discipline."

Two years after the bombing, Theodore J. Kaczynski, who would shortly be identified as the Unabomber, sent Gelernter a letter: "People with advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are," he wrote. "If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world." Gelernter himself, in fact, has always been profoundly ambivalent about technology. "Because David has a concern for the whole of human life, he doesn't fall for the view that technology can provide answers to our deepest needs and aspirations," says Kass. Gelernter's byline routinely appears over articles that include statements like: "American schools would do better if they junked their Macs and PC's and let students fool around somewhere else. Schools should be telling students to reads books, not play with computers."

Indeed, in an unusual and overlooked epilogue to Mirror Worlds, Gelernter imagined two fictional professors—his alter egos: a composer and an electrical engineer—walking and talking in the woods north of Yale's campus. "Remember running, when you were a kid, just for the hell of it? Just for fun?" asks the technologist. "That's why we do technology … it feels great, it's the human thing to do." But the humanist remains wary. "I've never said the possibilities aren't tantalizing," he counters. "All I'm saying is that the dangers are also frightening. I'm saying I'm worried and you're saying sorry, I can't help it."

So how did a techno-skeptic awash in nostalgia for a less high-tech age become, in the words of The New York Times, a "rock star" in the world of computer science? "It was natural in the sense that computers were never remote or frightening," Gelernter says. His father, Herbert, is a professor emeritus of computer science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. "I turned to computer science to make a living, but I also did it in the belief that, if I did not depend on painting and writing for income, I would be free to paint and write what I chose." In Drawing Life, Gelernter dropped an aside that provides a key for entering his thought. In retrospect, he wrote, one of the reasons he wound up in computer science was his dislike of "intellectuals"—and his unwillingness to be one.

Gelernter traffics in ideas, but he despises intellectuals and blames them for irreparably degrading American culture. "Stop any person on the street and ask them to name a living poet, a living painter, or a living composer. There will be complete silence," Gelernter says. "When I was a child, artists were heroes. Everyday people knew Robert Frost's poems, and not only people like me, a respected Yale professor. Classical music was moving closer to the middle class, Leonard Bernstein concerts were broadcast on television. It was a marvelous thing to have poets, novelists, painters, and musicians representing the middle and working classes and giving them greater and greater artistic depth. All of this," he says, sweeping his arm through the air, "was killed or at least dealt a very serious blow by the encroachment of the universities."

Gelernter is perched on a stool in his airy, sunlit kitchen. Spread before him is a light lunch of crackers, cheese, hummus, and cookies. In an adjacent room, Audrey, a bright-red 10-year-old parrot, and Flint, a cockatiel, bustle about in their cages, which are positioned in front of a television tuned to Fox News. (He and his wife, he says later, leave the television on because the birds enjoy the stimulation. Audrey and Flint only watch Fox News. "I don't want them misinformed," Gelernter explains with a grin.)

Gelernter places himself firmly in the ranks of men—and they are almost all men—like E.B. White, so-called nonintellectuals who are dubious of ideology and abstraction, as well as patriotic (a rare quality among contemporary intellectuals, he says). Such figures—Gelernter's heroes—include White's colleagues at The New Yorker, A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell; Irving Kristol; and Norman Podhoretz, among others, all of whom operated, by and large, outside academe. "They were the smartest ones," he says. "Compare T.S. Eliot to an English professor at Yale." Now, Gelernter continues, academe has taken over the intelligentsia, turning "narrow-mindedness into a virtue, narrow-mindedness intellectually and narrow-mindedness politically." He scorns specialization as "a killer virus," the "toxic disease of the modern intelligentsia."

Depending on whom you ask, Gelernter's intellectual adventurism is the mark of a true Renaissance man or the desperate flailing of a scattershot dilettante. Around Yale, there is a curious reluctance to criticize him on the record. "Some communication at Yale is conducted in raised eyebrows and significant silences," notes Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at the university, when asked about this reticence. It may be that many of his colleagues are reluctant to speak openly about Gelernter out of sympathy for his experience with the Unabomber. Whatever the case, few want to be publicly critical. Gelernter's admirers are more effusive. Richard Starr, managing editor of The Weekly Standard, describes him as a "polymath." Kass strikes a reverential tone. "David has the moral passion and moral courage of a prophet, the sensitivity and imaginative power of a poet, and the clarity and intellectual probity of a scientist," he says, adding, "There is a kind of genius at work in David."


Gelernter's career, his habitual breaches of disciplinary borders, can be seen as a revolt against the prevailing tides of academic life. His is also the career of a supremely confident thinker. Pressed to explain his intellectual certitude, Gelernter uncharacteristically struggles for words. "An artist has to have his own vision. He has to see things uniquely." His voice trails off. "How can I put this without saying I am naturally arrogant?" he says under his breath. "My intellectual heroes," he begins again, "were all fiercely independent." William Blake—a polymathic figure renowned as both a poet and a visual artist—"declared himself a visionary and a prophet." After a few beats of silence, Gelernter adds a clarification. "I don't claim to be Blake, but his life is an inspiration. I hope to emulate his artistic heroism."

Tony Bennett, 82, lifts a glass to his friend Frank Sinatra at Manhattan’s newly revitalized Monkey Bar. The singer is integrally involved in the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, in Queens.

That Old Sinatra Magic

Tony Bennett salutes Frank Sinatra, for showing the way.


Frank Sinatra was my best friend. Seventy years ago this summer, he released his first recordings with the Harry James Orchestra. But my earliest recollection of hearing his voice actually comes from four years before. Every week, as an 11-year-old kid, I would tune in to what was really the first American Idol–type program, a radio show called Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour. The winning group on the evening of September 8, 1935, was called the Hoboken Four, and their spokesman was Frank Sinatra, then aged 19. Even before I heard them sing I was captivated by Sinatra’s confidence. In response to Major Bowes’ booming query “Who will speak for the group?,” Sinatra piped up, “I will. I’m Frankie. We’re looking for jobs—how ’bout it? Everyone that’s ever heard us liked us.” Even Bowes had to chuckle.

Who is your favorite crooner? Take your pick in VF.com’s poll.
By 1939, Sinatra was singing and recording with Harry James, and the magic was spreading. Musicians were the first to notice his uniqueness. In less than a year Sinatra would join one of the best of the big bands, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. And I was amazed at how Frank, from studying how T.D. played, learned to extend his breathing, which gave him better vocal control and the ability to sing two or three sentences before taking another breath. That subtle and elegant nuance kept a listener hanging on every word, captivated the imagination, and caused his fans, myself included, to swoon. I couldn’t believe anyone could sing that lovely. When I would see Frank at the Paramount in Manhattan, the streets were so crowded with people hoping to get in to his shows that it looked like New Year’s Eve in Times Square, every day. Obviously, it was beyond my scope as an 11-year-old to imagine that Sinatra would go on to become the first popular singer responsible for mass hysteria from an audience—before Elvis or the Beatles.
But as Sinatra matured, the one element of his singing that had the most lasting impact on me was best articulated by the man himself. He once observed in an interview, “Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I’m honest.” To me, the hallmark of success in singing is “honesty,” and this is true for all manner of vocalist, from Hank Williams to K. D. Lang, from Billie Holiday to Luciano Pavarotti, to Sinatra himself. The singers who are the most honest are the ones who become immortalized. The writer Pete Hamill once noted that, unlike Bing Crosby’s, Sinatra’s singing “always revealed more than it concealed.” Emotional honesty really became the premise of every record I’ve made and every performance I’ve given.
Sinatra was the featured cover story in the April 23, 1965, edition of Life magazine. It was entitled “Sinatra Opens Up,” and he spoke candidly of how he felt about other singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. At one point he said, “But for my money Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. [He] gets across what the composer had in mind, and probably a little more.” I like to think that what he heard in my singing was the same honesty that I, and millions of others, found in his.
I remember an evening in the early 1970s when I was appearing at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and I got a phone call from one of Sinatra’s closest musician friends, saxophonist Vido Musso. He said Frank wanted to invite me to join him and Vido (who was a superb Italian cook) for dinner after my show, adding, “And bring your pianist, Ralph Sharon.” He gave me an address, which turned out to be a small restaurant way off the Vegas Strip, that would offer privacy. It was just the four of us, and the meal and conversation were memorable. Frank reflected on his life … the ups and downs … the amazing path he’d traveled from that evening with the Hoboken Four in 1935 to becoming “King” of the entertainment world. Toward the end of the evening Sinatra said, “Before we go, I’d really enjoy it if you and Ralph could perform a song.” And in this small room, late in the evening, with Frank Sinatra sitting only a couple feet away, and inspired by our time together that night, I sang a Jerome Kern song. It was a moment I will never forget: “Yesterdays / Yesterdays / Days I knew as sweet / Sequestered days.… Sad am I / Glad am I / For today I’m dreaming / Of yesterdays.”
He started out as Frankie, then became Frank, then the Chairman of the Board and, of course, Ol’ Blue Eyes—but he remained true to himself and his friends … and he was a best friend to me. One of Frank’s favorite toasts: “May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.”

The News

In the minds of most journalists, the work we do is indispensable, and has always been indispensable, to the successful operation of a democratic society.

A democracy requires an informed public, which journalism generates, and because we monitor the performance of government, we ensure that it honestly and capably serves the people. Journalism schools often have rhetoric to that effect emblazoned on their walls—certainly ours does. We're here to train the future bearers of our democratic function and to do what we can to nudge the current bearers to do a better job.

At this moment, given the precarious financial state of the news media, our core conviction about the role of our profession feels a bit shaky—more on that in a moment. But schools and departments of journalism are generally thriving. The contradiction is especially noticeable because the education sector is just about the only part of journalism whose business model is still in excellent health. How can we be so evidently countercyclical? And what can we do to help change the situation for news organizations, so that journalism schools and the profession might thrive together?

In hindsight, it seems clear that just about all living journalists grew up taking the solidity of the social and economic arrangements underlying our work too much for granted. Yes, until 10 or 15 years ago, it seemed as if practically everybody was in the ambit of the mainstream media, but that didn't mean there was a loyal mass audience for news about public affairs. Newspapers were vast bundles of information—sports scores, classified ads, movie schedules, comic strips, supermarket discount coupons—no one part of which had to stand on its own economically. Television and radio news were the sole sources for a summary of the great events of the day, on the day they occurred.

But today the Internet, by doing a wonderful thing—making every component part of the news separately and instantly available to anyone with a broadband connection—has relentlessly picked apart the economic logic of news organizations. It turns out that original reporting on public affairs, unbundled from other information and untethered from high-priced retail advertising, has trouble paying for itself. So, by inexorable economic logic, fewer people are being paid to do it.

Yes, the nation's founders wrote the First Amendment, and the citizens of the early republic passed it. But with respect to the press, that represented an extension of the guarantee of free speech to printed matter, not the creation of a sanctioned professional category. Information-seeking reporters took decades to arrive on the American scene. First there had to be cities, and fast, powerful printing presses, and ways of making enough money in the newspaper business to pay for newsrooms. The big-city newsrooms of the late 20th century were a workable support system for the social function of reportorial journalism, but even then it was anomalous for such an important democratic task to be entrusted almost entirely to private businesses. Anyway, the point soon became moot because the economics of the arrangement stopped working.

Related ContentAcademe and the Decline of News Media
University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive
Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Tenure
I've Read the News Today, Oh Boy
We Need 'Philosophy of Journalism'
Nota Bene: A Peripatetic Press
Why haven't journalism schools suffered the same fate as newspapers? In general, universities—which, like newspapers, only more so, are great bundles of unrelated activities having to do with the production and dissemination of knowledge—have thus far been immune to the process of disaggregation that has devastated news organizations. The idea that belonging to the middle class absolutely requires first getting a bachelor's degree from a residential college, a concept that would have been considered crazy a century ago, is now deeply ingrained in American culture.

Journalism programs in universities mainly serve undergraduates, so the programs live under the protective umbrella of that assumption. Graduate journalism programs mainly attract people who have fallen in love with the profession, so those programs are protected from strict cost-benefit calculations. Many young people seem to be excited by the turmoil in journalism and see it as an opportunity to get in on something new, rather than as a threat. And journalism schools have a powerful argument for themselves today because they can teach the skills that the profession demands—in working in digital media, and in reporting on complicated subjects—far better than newsrooms can.

A generation ago, the essential skill for journalists, writing a breaking news story, was fairly intuitive, and many graduates of journalism schools could expect careers that entailed long, slow rises through large news organizations, with training embedded in every step. Today many of our new graduates find themselves working at understaffed Web sites—either freestanding operations or parts of traditional news organizations—where they have to be comfortable with Web publishing from Day 1 and have to handle quite advanced and specialized editorial content, without much advice from anybody. Education is important in this environment because the workplace isn't set up to provide it.

Because of their location in universities, journalism schools have access to large populations of young people, and many are making efforts to teach "news literacy" courses to nonjournalism students. Such courses aim to educate civilians about how journalism works, but also, and more important, to instill the habit of reading the news every day. The idea is that a daily report from a reputable news organization is to citizenship what the proper diet is to health: a long-term, life-enriching practice for individuals, and, in the aggregate, an important element of a better-functioning society.

Those courses are a good thing. But journalism programs in universities can work toward the ideal of an informed, engaged citizenry in other, even more urgently important ways.

The main problem in journalism today lies on the supply side, not the demand side. It is true that the unfettered, ungoverned Internet can offer up all sorts of misinformation to readers. But it is also true that, unlike traditional news media, the Internet provides a means for instant correction and counterargument. (Our leading font of durable journalistic misinformation is talk radio and television, not the Internet.) Online encyclopedias, auctioneers, and retailers have found pretty good ways of establishing trust across large communities of strangers; that is within journalism's reach, too. The Internet almost certainly has expanded the audience for genuine news more than it has expanded the audience for misleading news. The world's top news organizations have attracted enormous global readerships, far beyond what they have ever had before, and millions of secondary sites, from aggregators to one-person blogs, are heavy direct and indirect users of material produced by those organizations.

Because the barrier to entry is so low, the Internet is also a great medium for journalistic experimentation; we don't have to wait around for big, tradition-bound organizations to innovate. The real difficulty is that the Internet doesn't support the kind of journalism that covers production costs, because almost all Internet journalism is free to readers and bargain-priced, compared with print, for advertisers. Opinion journalism, of the kind invented by pamphleteers in the 1700s, thrives on the Internet. Original reporting does not. So even if every single person under 30 woke up every morning with a gnawing hunger for news, it's not at all clear that the hunger could be satisfied, especially if it's a hunger for local news.

Therefore journalism schools ought to explore, and are already exploring, the possibility of becoming significant producers of original news reporting to make up for the loss of the reporting that economically devastated news organizations can no longer afford. Journalism schools and departments are practical-minded, often to a fault; they are oriented toward sending their students out to report under faculty members' direction. The advent of the Web has made publication and distribution of the fruits of students' reporting easy and inexpensive. Anyone in the world who has a good Internet connection can log on to the Columbia School of Journalism's Web site and find at least two dozen journalistic sites operated by our students and faculty members. The efforts include local-news sites about Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and upper Manhattan; subject-matter sites on charter schools, religion, and the economic crisis; and media-related sites for magazine, radio, broadcast, and digital journalism.

What journalism and the public most need right now is serious, continuing coverage of matters of public importance: city halls, school systems, statehouses. Journalism schools are not fully equipped to provide that now, but the logistical and financial difficulty of equipping them to do so would be far less than the difficulty of creating and sustaining new news organizations built from scratch. Like teaching hospitals, journalism schools can provide essential services to their communities while they are educating their students.

Journalism schools not only can replace the original reporting capability that news organizations have lost, but also can raise the level of sophistication in the practice of journalism. Why? Because so many of them are located in research universities that are our society's leading collections of top-level expertise across all realms of knowledge. Journalism schools should be deeply involved with the other parts of their universities, not just in order to spread the word about journalism, but also to learn, and then to teach, about the substance of the issues that their students report on.

Journalism is more interdisciplinary than most other fields of study in the university, and more oriented toward producing published work aimed at nonexperts. But it should—and, at this point, probably must—have a greater ambition than simply reporting facts without analysis or context. News organizations are finding that "breaking news" has become a commodity without much economic value. Journalism schools, because they are in universities, are an ideal place for journalism to find its way toward producing work that truly explains societies to their citizens.

Nicholas Lemann is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Perhaps Consuls

He Can't Take Another Book

An icon of a White House that is coming to seem amateurish.

By PEGGY NOONAN

This week, two points in an emerging pointillist picture of a White House leaking support—not the support of voters, though polls there show steady decline, but in two core constituencies, Washington's Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment.
From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of—and warning for—the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, "a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man." They once held "an unromantically high opinion of Obama," and were key to his rise, but now they are concluding that the president isn't "the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought."
She scored "the Chicago crowd," which she characterized as "a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team." The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision—"an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment."
As I read Ms. Drew's piece, I was reminded of something I began noticing a few months ago in bipartisan crowds. I would ask Democrats how they thought the president was doing. In the past they would extol, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, his virtues. Increasingly, they would preface their answer with, "Well, I was for Hillary." This in turn reminded me of a surprising thing I observe among loyal Democrats in informal settings and conversations: No one loves Barack Obama. Half the American people say they support him, and Democrats are still with him. But there were Bill Clinton supporters who really loved him. George W. Bush had people who loved him. A lot of people loved Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. But no one seems to love Mr. Obama now; they're not dazzled and head over heels. That's gone away. He himself seems a fairly chilly customer; perhaps in turn he inspires chilly support. But presidents need that rock—bottom 20% who, no matter what's happening—war, unemployment—adore their guy, have complete faith in him, and insist that you love him, too.
They're the hard 20 a president always keeps. Nixon kept them! Obama probably has a hard 20 too, but whatever is keeping them close, it doesn't seem to be love.
***
Just as stinging as Elizabeth Drew on domestic matters was Leslie Gelb on Mr. Obama and foreign policy in the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president's Asia trip suggested "a disturbing amateurishness in managing America's power." The president's Afghanistan review has been "inexcusably clumsy," Mideast negotiations have been "fumbling." So unsuccessful was the trip that Mr. Gelb suggested Mr. Obama take responsibility for it "as President Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs."
He added that rather than bowing to emperors—Mr. Obama "seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably"—he should begin to bow to "the voices of experience" in Washington.
When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.
It also raises a distressing question: Who are the wise men and women now? Who are the Robert Lovetts, Chip Bohlens and Robert Strausses who can came in to help a president in trouble right his ship? America seems short of wise men, or short on those who are universally agreed to be wise. I suppose Vietnam was the end of that, but establishments exist for a reason, and it is hard for a great nation to function without the presence of a group of "the oldest and wisest" who can not only give sound advice but help engineer how that advice will be reported and received.
***
More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns
click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace
Mr Obama is in a hard place. Health care hangs over him, and if he is lucky he will lose a close vote in the Senate. The common wisdom that he can't afford to lose is exactly wrong—he can't afford to win with such a poor piece of legislation. He needs to get the issue behind him, vow to fight another day, and move on. Afghanistan hangs over him, threatening the unity of his own Democratic congressional base. There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama's rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demand baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.
Which gets us back to the bow.
In a presidency, a picture or photograph becomes iconic only when it seems to express something people already think. When Gerald Ford was spoofed for being physically clumsy, it took off. The picture of Ford losing his footing and tumbling as he came down the steps of Air Force One became a symbol. There was a reason, and it wasn't that he was physically clumsy. He was not only coordinated but graceful. He'd been a football star at the University of Michigan and was offered contracts by the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.
But the picture took off because it expressed the growing public view that Ford's policies were bumbling and stumbling. The picture was iconic of a growing political perception.
The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic, and they would not be if they weren't playing off a growing perception. If the pictures had been accompanied by headlines from Asia saying "Tough Talks Yield Big Progress" or "Obama Shows Muscle in China," the bowing pictures might be understood this way: "He Stoops to Conquer: Canny Obama shows elaborate deference while he subtly, toughly, quietly advances his nation's interests."
But that's not how the pictures were received or will be remembered.
It is true that Mr. Obama often seems not to have a firm grasp of—or respect for—protocol, of what has been done before and why, and of what divergence from the traditional might imply. And it is true that his political timing was unfortunate. When a great nation is feeling confident and strong, a surprising presidential bow might seem gracious. When it is feeling anxious, a bow will seem obsequious.
The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic not for those reasons, however, but because they express a growing political perception, and that is that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.
It is hard to be president, and White Houses under pressure take refuge in thoughts that become mantras. When the previous White House came under mounting criticism from 2005 through '08, they comforted themselves by thinking, They criticized Lincoln, too. You could see their minds whirring: Lincoln was criticized, Lincoln was great, ergo we are great. But of course just because they say you're stupid doesn't mean you're Lincoln.
One senses the Obama people are doing the Lincoln too, and adding to it the consoling thought that this is only the first year, we've got three years to go, we can change perceptions, don't worry.
But they should worry. You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily. The first year is when indelible impressions are made and iconic photos emerge.

How about letting Cokie Roberts, husband Steve, Elizabeth Drew, Oprah and Peggy Noonan run things for a while?

Dubai

It was almost a convincing show. The message to the City of London from Dubai was that the city-state had not only weathered the global economic crisis but was now destined to benefit as more financial groups escaped the high tax regimes and mounting regulatory restraints of more established centres.
That was two weeks ago. I was at a conference in London organised by the Dubai International Financial Centre, which bills itself as one of Dubai’s great achievements. Of course at the time no one in the room had an inkling of the storm that was about to be unleashed by the emirate – the demand for a delay in the debt payments of its flagship Dubai World, a move that sent jitters through global markets and sparked fears of a setback to the economic recovery.
Nor did participants know that the man who opened the conference – the well-respected Omar bin Sulaiman, head of the DIFC – would be sacked a few days later, without a hint of explanation. But then, this was only the most dramatic sign of a certain malady in the emirate – an alarming disconnect between the bubble of Dubai and the real world.
Today the city-state, which gave us Palm-shaped islands and indoor ski resorts, is a financial centre that cannot pay its debts. And it has the financial community – much of it, incidentally, with offices at the DIFC – up in arms, contending that it had been misled about the city’s debt management intentions.
Dubai has always marketed itself as a model of a global city, in a backward Arab region which has miserably failed to overcome its conflicts or meet the aspirations of its young population. The biography of its ambitious ruler – Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum – depicts a man with a mission to usher in no less than an Arab renaissance.
Yet Dubai has managed its finances with a combination of an autocratic state refusing to face reality and a secretive family company oblivious to the expectations and the workings of world markets.
If the global meltdown washed up on the Dubai shores this week, when other troubled cities are on their way to recovery, it is, at least in part, because it took the emirate so long to admit that it was in trouble.
Just over a year ago, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and world markets tumbled, the word in Dubai was that the emirate was too strong to be caught up in the turbulence.
In one of many surreal moments that followed the Lehman debacle, Nakheel, the debt-laden Dubai World developer at the centre of the storm, unveiled plans to build the tallest tower in Dubai. A competitor, of course, was already well on its way to completing the emirate’s tallest building. The new one, though, would soar above Burj Dubai, said Nakheel.
Officials insisted that Dubai knows how to take advantage of the misfortunes of others. We live in a violent and unstable environment, they would say, but that makes us a magnet for people and money fleeing other volatile spots. This is the Dubai model. This is the Dubai miracle.
In fact, it was probably officials’ fear of admitting to their boss the extent of the indebtedness of companies under their charge that delayed the reckoning.
Dubai eventually got over its denial – once it had counted its debts, which reached a massive $80bn, it was impossible not to. But it was not until February that it was helped out by Abu Dhabi, through a $10bn Dubai five-year bond issue to which the central bank of the federation, the United Arab Emirates, subscribed.
Why so long? Because the proud Sheikh Mohammed, it seems, was reluctant to be bailed out by his richer neighbour, possibly fearing it would put a damper on Dubai’s image and constrain its independence. Nor was he willing to part with some of Dubai’s crown jewels at distressed prices. Some people suspect that it is the same dogged resistance that has landed Dubai in this week’s mess.
Even after the February bond issue, officials in the emirate were coming up with all sorts of explanations for why it should not be defined as a “bail-out”.
Though the markets calmed down after the bail-out, it was not long before more confusion set in. In May one of the main people entrusted with steering the emirate out of the crisis – and one of the few who recognised the full scope of the challenge – was demoted.
Nasser al-Sheikh, the director-general of the finance department, seemed to have been a victim of a power struggle that intensified this year, as the head of the ruler’s court has sought to consolidate his own power, at the expense of aides who had been in favour during the boom years. It was not lost on some observers that while other competent people were being removed, Sultan bin Sulayem, the head of Dubai World, had been stripped of many of his powers, but is still at the helm of the company.
To be fair, Dubai’s plans to restructure its companies and put resources in the most viable assets might be sound. But given that details of any strategy are treated like a national secret, and that decision-making is wrapped up in palace intrigue, the city and now the rest of the world are left to operate on rumours and speculation rather than facts.
Perhaps none of this should surprise us. Dubai is a place where investors fell for trick advertising a few years ago that said the emirate would build a “bubble city”, a development of restaurants and museums suspended above ground by helium balloons and surrounded by a transparent enclosure.
This fantasy was never meant to get off the ground. But maybe it secretly did? And maybe that is where some of the decision-makers have been living.

The writer is the FT’s Middle East editor

Memoirs

This is because, unlike the books by Conroy and Morris, which were immensely skillful and revealing but emotionally guarded, Exley's was raw, self-lacerating and unrelievedly confessional. Oddly enough, it is mentioned only in a footnote in Ben Yagoda's excellent "Memoir: A History" -- evidently because it was passed off as fiction -- but it soon became a model, if not the model, for all those men and women, most of them relatively young, who now pour forth their confessions in book after book after book.
Never mind that few of these confessions can be of interest to anyone except the people writing them, never mind that few of these people know how to tell a story or write literate prose, never mind that the market is now so thoroughly saturated that it is just about impossible to separate what little wheat there may be from the vast ocean of chaff. What matters is that, as Yagoda says, we live in an age of "more narcissism overall, less concern for privacy, a strong interest in victimhood, and a therapeutic culture." He quotes Washington Post reviewer Carolyn See: "Those people in [Alcoholics Anonymous] in the late 40's and early 50's can be said to have reinvented American narrative style. All the terrible, terrible things that had ever happened to them just made for a great pitch."
One would look high and low to find more incontrovertible and devastating evidence of the triumph of memoir (if "triumph" is the word for it) than is contained in Yagoda's opening chapter. In mostly deadpan style, he enumerates in some 25 pages the "million little subgenres," from "celebrity, misery, canine, methamphetamine, and eccentric-mother memoirs" on and on through "the dad memoir," the spiritual memoir, the "rock-star memoir," and of course "the seemingly endless series of bombshells over fraudulent lives," most notoriously James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," which was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as a selection for her book club, then revealed as a fraud, for which "she invited him again onto her show and hung him out to dry." As Yagoda says:
"Autobiographically speaking, there has never been a time like it. Memoir has become the central form of the culture: not only the way stories are told, but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed or salvaged. The sheer volume of memoirs is unprecedented; the way the books were trailed by an unceasing stream of contention, doubt, hype, and accusations is distressing. Yet every single one of the books, and every piece of the debate about them, had a historical precedent. How did we come to this pass? The only way to answer that question is to go back a couple of thousand years and tell the story from the beginning."
Which is just what Yagoda does. Beginning with Julius Caesar's "Commentaries" (known to generations of Latin students as "Caesar's Gallic Wars") and "The Confessions of Saint Augustine," he brings in example after example: "Peter Abelard's Historia calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), remains a compelling cautionary tale and, in its depiction of mental and physical hurt, anticipates today's misery memoirs"; spiritual memoirs of the 17th century, with their "back-and-forth dance between doubt and faith," anticipating modern memoirs that "follow an account of the author's wayward past (and the more wayward the better), his or her discovery of some sort of secular or sacred light, and then, finally, sweet redemption"; 19th-century American slave narratives, which "outnumbered every other kind of book by African-Americans" and anticipated the 20th-century memoirs by the likes of Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and Malcolm X.
Yagoda -- a much-published writer who teaches at the University of Delaware -- touches just about all the bases, some more lightly than others, but I can think of no significant omissions beyond his failure to give Exley anything more than a footnoted nod. He offers a nimble and nuanced discussion of the nettlesome issue of truth and fiction in autobiography and memoir. Dating back to the 19th century, "the spate of unreliable memoirs [has] reflected an uncertainty and sometimes malleability about 'truth' that showed up in the wider culture as well." On the one hand, we want "authenticity and credibility" in autobiographical writing; on the other, we want to be entertained, which can sometimes lead writers to exaggeration or invention.
Beyond that, we don't really understand that "the human memory is by nature untrustworthy: contaminated not merely by gaps, but by distortions and fabrications that inevitably and blamelessly creep into it." Memory "is itself a creative writer," and the combination of "memory like Swiss cheese, arrogant confidence in its integrity -- seems to be a human trait, and is certainly reflected in most autobiographies . . . which do not grant even the possibility that the chronicle they offer -- including the word-for-word transcription of conversations held half a century before -- is less than 100 percent accurate." Yagoda quotes Mark Twain:
"I used to remember my brother Henry walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old. It was remarkable in me to remember a thing like that and it was still more remarkable that I should cling to the delusion for thirty years that I did remember it -- for of course it never happened; he would not have been able to walk at that age. . . . For many years I remembered helping my grandfather drinking his whiskey when I was six weeks old but I do not tell about that any more now; I am grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened."
Yagoda quotes that wonderful passage to underscore the unreliability of memory, but it does not deter him from taking an upbeat view of his subject. "The memoir boom," he writes, "for all its sins, has been a net plus for the cause of writing. Under its auspices, voices and stories have emerged that, otherwise, would have been dull impersonal nonfiction tomes or forgettable autobiographical novels, or wouldn't have been expressed at all." Alas, it is here that I part company with this otherwise exemplary book. What the memoir boom has in fact given us is too many dull or forgettable memoirs, precious few of which have enriched our literature but most of which have simply encouraged the narcissism of their authors.
yardleyj@washpost.com

Brain

About 5,000 years ago, societies in ancient Sumeria, China and South America invented writing, and in the millennia since, the ability to read has propelled human intellectual and cultural development, vastly expanding our capacity to learn, create, explore and record what we think, feel and know. Reading supplies our brains with an external hard drive and gives us access to our species's past: In the words of Francisco de Quevedo, it enables us "to listen to the dead with our eyes."
But how, in such a short time, did the human species evolve this unique skill, one that requires the brain to decode written words visually and process their sounds and sense rapidly? In this fascinating and scholarly book, French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene explains what scientists now know about how the human brain performs the feat of reading, and what made this astonishing cultural invention biologically possible.
Presented with a word's image on the retina, average readers of English can, within a few 10ths of a second, match it with one of 50,000 or more words stored in their mental dictionaries, comprehend its meaning in context, and proceed seamlessly to the next word. Amazingly, most children become proficient readers during elementary school (although learning to read Italian is easier, and learning to read Chinese harder, than learning to read English). In recent years, new imaging techniques have allowed researchers to watch normal brains in the act of reading, and studies have shed light on why the brains of dyslexic children, as well as those of certain stroke victims, fail to process written words successfully.
"Only a stroke of good fortune allowed us to read," Dehaene writes near the end of his tour of the reading brain. It was Homo sapiens's luck that in our primate ancestors, a region of the brain's paired temporal lobes evolved over a period of 10 million years to specialize in the visual identification of objects. Experiments in monkeys show that, within this area, individual nerve cells are dedicated to respond to a specific visual stimulus: a face, a chair, a vertical line. Research suggests that, in humans, a corresponding area evolved to become what Dehaene calls the "letterbox," responsible for processing incoming written words. Located in the brain's left hemisphere near the junction of the temporal and occipital lobes, the letterbox performs identical tasks in readers of all languages and scripts. Like a switchboard, it transmits signals to multiple regions concerned with words' sound and meaning -- for example, to areas that respond to noun categories (people, animals, vegetables), to parts of the motor cortex that respond to action verbs ("kiss," "kick"), even to cells in the brain's associative cortex that home in on very specific stimuli. (In one epileptic patient, for example, a nerve cell was found that fired only in response to images or the written name of actress Jennifer Aniston!)
Children learn reading in a stepwise process: first, awareness that words are made up of phonemes or speech sounds (ba, da); then the discovery that there's a correspondence between these speech sounds and pairs or groups of letters. Later the child begins to recognize entire words, and after a few years, reading speed becomes independent of word length. Dehaene deplores the whole-language approach to teaching reading in which beginning readers are presented with entire words or phrases in the hope of fostering earlier comprehension of text. He cites research showing that children who first learn which sounds are represented by which letters, and how pairs or groups of letters correspond to speech sounds, make steadier progress and achieve better reading scores than those taught using the whole-language method. He also notes the success of teaching methods that incorporate multiple senses and motor gestures, such as those used in Montessori schools. For example, in preparation for learning to read, young Montessori students are often asked to trace with their fingers the shapes of large letters cut out of sandpaper. The exercise makes use of vision, touch and spatial orientation, as well as mimicking the gestures used to print each letter.
Between 5 percent and 17 percent of U.S. children suffer from dyslexia, or severe difficulty in reading. The disorder runs in families and probably has no single cause. Several susceptibility genes have been identified, most of them influencing the migration of nerve cells within the developing brain of the fetus. Research suggests that, even as infants, many dyslexic children have trouble hearing the difference between similar-sounding consonants such as b and d; but about one in four dyslexics has primarily visual difficulties with word-processing. Although there is no prospect of a cure for dyslexia, Dehaene points to promising results with various intervention strategies aimed at strengthening awareness of speech sounds and letter differences. After dozens of hours of training using such programs, Dehaene writes, the majority of dyslexic children "end up reading adequately, even if performance continues to lag behind that of their peers."
Reading, Dehaene writes, is "by far the finest gem" in humanity's cultural storehouse, and judging by the ubiquity of electronic messages and Web surfing, it's a skill no less essential in the digital age than it was during the age of print.

Books of the Year 2009

Beckett, Tóibín, Mantel and Bolaño feature in this year's list
Julian Barnes, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Nagel, et al

This is a selection of pieces from the TLS Books of the Year

JULIAN BARNES
The main literary event of 2009 was the death of John Updike. Generous to the last, he left us two posthumous books: in prose, My Father’s Tears, and in verse, Endpoint (both Hamish Hamilton), an account of his last years – and days – of grateful, tender looking around. He was still writing in his final weeks (“Days later, the results came casually through: / the gland, biopsied, showed metastasis”) and correcting proofs on his deathbed. Over here, death afforded him no courtesy, and the stories received several reviews of impudent stupidity; the longer view will see them as a fit end to the staggeringly rich arc of story collections which began fifty years ago with “The Same Door” (1959). In part-homage, Everyman usefully reprinted the full version of “The Maples Stories”, one of his keenest anatomies of the marriage problem.
Everyman also publish Updike’s final reworking of the Rabbit quartet, retitled by him as Rabbit Angstrom. Rereading confirms it as the greatest American novel of the second half of the twentieth century. An Angstrom is a hundred-millionth of a centimetre: a fitting name, since Updike, apart from his many other virtues, simply saw in finer detail than most of his contemporaries.
ALEX CLARK
People have queued up to praise Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), but it can hardly be said too frequently what a brilliant novel it is: brimming with invention, conceived with a powerful intelligence and executed near-flawlessly. The result was to make us see a set of people and historical events from an entirely different perspective and to render them far more comprehensible to us than a more ostensibly straightforward retelling. I also loved Iain Sinclair’s work of non-fiction, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (Hamish Hamilton). Despite being a longstanding fan of Sinclair’s work, I really began this because I live in the part of London that he describes, and feel I know it well; a few pages in, and I realized how little I have really come to grips with its peculiar pockets and byways. I don’t imagine it’s required reading at Hackney Town Hall, but it certainly made the streets around me seem alive with histories hitherto largely untold, and brought home the strange psychological bond we form with our little patch of town.
To read the TLS review of Wolf Hall, click here.
To read the TLS review of Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, click here.
TERRY EAGLETON
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) may not be the greatest work of genius to have appeared this year, but it is certainly one of the bravest. Sand, who teaches history in Tel Aviv, argues that the Jewish people, far from constituting a distinct ethnic group, descend for the most part from converts whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Only under the sway of a historiography which arose on the back of European nationalism – what Sand calls “mythistory” – could these disparate groups be welded into a single nation. One major item of mythistory was the idea of exile, on which Sand writes a coolly demystifying chapter. Only by acknowledging a real rather than mythological past, he argues, can the intellectual foundation be laid for a new vision of Israel’s political future. It is gratifying to learn that the book lingered for a long time on Israel’s bestseller list.
SEAMUS HEANEY
The most bracing read was The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940 (Cambridge), a portrait of the Dubliner as a young European with a hard gemlike gift for language, learning and mockery. Beckett’s genius exercises itself most exuberantly in the correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy, another Irish poet more at home in Paris, his senior but his soulmate. Constantly Beckett is veering between certainty about his need to write and doubt about the results, all expressed in prose that is undoubting, delighted and demanding. Which might be one way of describing John Banville’s The Infinities (Picador), a novel (if that is the word for a work that flaunts its Ovidian art so mischievously) where the gods are not so much ex machina as in flagrante and where this author once again surprises by a fine excess. Surprise abounds also in Paul Durcan’s Life Is a Dream (Harvill Secker), the poet’s selection from his variously heartbreaking, hilarious, Hibernia-baiting work done between 1967 and 2007. Durcan’s copious bitter-sweet clowning is a way of telling the truth slant, but William Golding’s 5,000-page journal seems to have told it direct, and as such was a valuable source for John Carey’s compelling, revealing and very readable William Golding: The man who wrote “Lord of the Flies” (Faber). This is “official” biography but nothing seems to have been off the record.
To read Allan Massie's review of William Golding: The who wrote "Lord of the Flies", click here.
SIMON JENKINS
There is no let-up in the stream of books on present discontents. On Iraq and Afghanistan there has been a predictable surge, evenly divided between the wars’ foregrounds and backgrounds. Best of the former is Stephen Grey’s Operation Snakebite (Viking), a devastating account of the battle for Musa Qala in Afghanistan in December 2007. It explains why the world’s most sophisticated armed forces are being defeated by the world’s least sophisticated, when the latter feel they fighting for a cause (and a homeland).
As for whether British troops are indeed the most sophisticated, Richard North’s Ministry of Defeat (Continuum) begs to differ. An admirable investigation of Britain’s most rotten ministry, it helps explain the questionable performance of British troops and especially their equipment in Iraq, with tales of incompetence worthy of the trenches. Heaven help us in a real war.
A different sort of front line is charted in Gillian Tett’s brilliant Fool’s Gold (Little, Brown). The war is the credit crunch and the theatre of operations the trading floor of J. P. Morgan. Anyone who thinks these antics need no further regulation should read Tett first. An elegant overview of the same events is supplied by the economic historian, Vince Cable, disappointing only when he attempts a cure. But then he is a Liberal Democrat spokesman.
Those eager for distraction on the home front can turn to Michael Bloch’s enjoyable biography of James Lees-Milne (John Murray). This picture of a mildly eccentric Briton incidentally relates a conservation epic, Lees-Milne’s virtually single-handed rescue from catastrophe of the finest portfolio of historic houses in the world, those of the National Trust.
FERDINAND MOUNT
The Italian Front in the First World War has been eclipsed by the horrors of the Western Front, but in fact the casualties in the slush and scree of the Italian Alps were just as appalling as they were in the mud of Flanders, the war aims as squalid and confused and the generals even more stupid and sadistic. Mark Thompson’s The White War (Faber) manages a perfect balance between gripping narrative and sober analysis. It picks up the unfinished business of the Risorgimento and helps to explain both the rise of Mussolini and the incoherent state of Italian politics to this day.
The long reflective essay on contemporary themes is a presently endangered species. (One can imagine a modern publisher turning down Lord Macaulay saying “Sorry, Tom, it’s just a lot of essays”.) Tony Judt is the master of the form on both sides of the Atlantic. In Reappraisals (Heinemann), there is a compelling ease about the way he leads you through the topic – Blair’s Britain, the Hiss case, the Fall of France – while you murmur “yes, that’s exactly how it really is”, until you find yourself at a destination which you had not quite expected but which is unarguably the right one.
THOMAS NAGEL
János Kis’s Politics as a Moral Problem (Central European University Press) is a superb study of the problem of dirty hands in politics, particularly democratic politics – the moral dilemmas that politicians face in achieving, maintaining, and exercising power. This is a particularly acute form of the moral problem of ends and means. The book discusses the philosophical background in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Weber and others, and examines a number of recent examples from European politics. Kis is a philosopher, but his political experience includes negotiating the transfer of power in Hungary in 1989, as leader of the primary dissident party, the Free Democrats.
Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.
GRAHAM ROBB
I finally caught up with The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (Allen Lane), in which the congenially authoritative Barry Cunliffe explains how a fourth-century bc inhabitant of Marseilles managed to circumnavigate Britain. Pytheas’s lost work, On the Ocean, must have been the book of the millennium. An equally perilous journey is undertaken by the unforgettable heroine of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Viking). Novelists whose prose is described as “flawless” can be a chore to read. Tóibín’s perfection is simply the unobtrusive vehicle of his surprisingly complex adventure.
André Guyaux’s Pléiade edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s Oeuvres complètes (Gallimard) was a welcome addition to the mountain of scholarship that would have appalled and embarrassed the boy from Charleville. There was a rare sense of academic fun in David Coward’s modern morality tale of Ken Deede – Voltaire Reloaded: Candide left, right and centre (lulu.com) – and in Corry Cropper’s Playing at Monarchy: Sport as metaphor in nineteenth-century France (Nebraska), which contains this piece of advice from the sports journalist, Eugène Chapus: “Appear to know nothing of your profession, and avoid technical terms at all times”.
To read Graham Robb's review of Rimbaud's Oeuvres complètes, click here.
ALI SMITH
The final parts of two great European novel trilogies were published in English this year: Jan Kjærstad’s Wergeland trilogy with The Discoverer (Arcadia), and Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto). Kjærstad’s trapeze act of interconnection makes life force out of its endgame; translator Barbara J. Haveland navigates this irrepressible Norwegian voyage through the universe with a studied lightness. Marías is simply astonishing. The concluding volume of his mighty Spanish trilogy about power, surveillance, morality and mortality is even more gripping than its predecessors. With its contemporary longsightedness and unique ethic-aesthetic agenda, Your Face Tomorrow seems to me unparallelled in literature – as, in its own right, does Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. In The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume Five, 1922–1923, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, (Oxford), Mansfield’s uncharacteristic repetitiveness coupled with a forced faux-brightness make it clear that she’s dying, and “governed by the Furies”. But its real revelation is the humour, liberation and unforeseeable uplift in her very last letters, from Gurdjieff’s freezing cold commune in Fontainebleau. “Do send Lit. Sups”, she wrote Murry. “They are so good for lighting fires.” And Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Viking) isn’t just a book for Christmas; a work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt you for life.
To read the TLS review of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, click here.
To read Ruth Scurr's review of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, click here.
EDMUND WHITE
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (Picador) was my favourite book of the year, though in some ways it falls short of the same author’s The Savage Detectives. What both books share is a romantic fascination with literary people. The first section of 2666 is about four literary scholars – three men and one woman, each person from a different country – all devoted to studying the same contemporary but utterly mysterious German novelist. The three men end up having sexual alliances with the woman, and the erotic game of musical chairs they play is both touching and mesmerizing for the reader. In later sections of this massive novel, Bolaño becomes obsessed with an endless series of murders in the north of Mexico – which surprisingly finally links up with the German novelist and his frightening son.
Whereas so much long contemporary fiction is a struggle to get through, Bolaño is always interesting. If the first and foremost requirement of fiction is that it be interesting, then there is no other contemporary writer as pleasing and successful as Bolaño.
To read Michael Saler's review of 2666, click here.

"Strategy without tactics is the slow road to victory," wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War, "but tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Stanley McChrystal, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, would do well to heed the words of the ancient Chinese general.
McChrystal is a lead member of the counter-insurgency (or "Coin") brigade that now dominates the US national security establishment. Coin theory emphasises a "population-centric" over an "enemy-centric" approach. It disinters the language of "clear, hold and build", resonant of the Vietnam era, and describes soldiers and marines as "nation-builders as well as warriors" (to borrow a phrase from the US army's much-lauded 2006 counter-insurgency field manual, co-authored by the celebrated General David Petraeus). Coin is predicated on the idea that it is possible to win supporters for an insurgency by providing security and basic services, and ensuring the presence of a strong, legitimate government.
Or, as McChrystal put it, in a memo to President Barack Obama leaked in September: "This new strategy must . . . be properly resourced and executed through an integrated civilian-military counter-insurgency campaign that earns the support of the Afghan people and provides them with a secure environment." Without extra troops, said McChrystal, the mission "will likely result in failure".
Critics of the new focus on counter-insurgency theory claim it is a tactical gimmick that enables policymakers to avoid thinking long and hard about what the endgame in Afghan­istan will actually look like. It is not a recipe for winning the war in the long run, they say; it is only for avoiding defeat in the short run.
“Coin doctrine is, at best, a collection of tactics that may or may not apply to a given situation," says Celeste Ward, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence under George W Bush. "But because of the absence of real discussion about US strategy and priorities, Coin has been elevated to the status of a strategy."
Coin's popularity, Ward told me, is that it "offers a framework that is palatable to people from very different political points of view: there is a unity of vision among both neocons and traditional Democrats". The former are excited by its emphasis on more troops, the latter by its focus on winning "hearts and minds" and "nation-building". It is for this reason, she says, that in Washington, DC today "counter-insurgency is king".
The proponents of Coin - or "Coinistas", as they have come to be known - point to the success of the 2007 US military "surge" in troop numbers in Iraq under the leadership of General David Petraeus, which they credit with reducing the levels of violence and insurgency across the country.
It is this "surge narrative" that has emboldened the Coinistas, but traditionalists, such as Colonel Gian Gentile, director of the military history programme at the US Military Academy at West Point, remain unconvinced.
The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq was the result of "a decision by senior American leaders in 2007 to pay large amounts of money to Sunni insurgents to stop attacking Americans and join the fight against al-Qaeda", says Gentile, who remains an outspoken critic of Coin despite being an active-duty officer. "Coupled with this was the decision by the Shia militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr to refrain from attacking coalition forces."
Gentile, who commanded a cavalry squad­ron in west Baghdad before the surge, says his "fundamental mission was to protect the people" and the "overall methods that the US army employed at the small-unit level where [he] operated were no different from the so-called new counter-insurgency methods used today".
Aside from the Iraq surge, Coinistas also point to earlier examples from history where counter-insurgency methods seem to have succeeded - in particular, the British colonial experience in Malaya (now Malaysia) between 1948 and 1960.
“Malaya is the 'gold standard' for Coin," says the historian Michael Vlahos, a member of the national security assessment team at Johns Hopkins University. But, he argues, this is a mistaken view: the Chinese Communist insurgents were a tiny and unpopular outside movement removed from the population, the British had a close and credible relationship with the ruling princes, and the local people were politically passive. And, it should be noted, it still took the British a dozen years to prevail.
None of those favourable conditions holds in Afghanistan, where the war has now entered its ninth year. The Taliban represent a huge section of the Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic grouping, who are largely unrepresented in the political and military establishment of the "new" Afghanistan; and neither America nor Britain is considered a friendly nation.
The Pashtuns are among the most fiercely tribalised and nationalist peoples in the world, united only against a foreign invader. The thread running through almost all insurgencies is opposition to foreigners. Sending more and more troops increases the size of the foreign footprint in Afghanistan, undermining the legitimacy of the host government. As even the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, has worried in the not-so-distant past: "Too many forces could look a lot like an occupation."
A numbers game
The Coin theory of "clear, hold and build" is manpower-intensive, relying on an increased number of counter-insurgents to maintain widespread law and order. The field manual emphasises the importance of "troop density", or the ratio of security forces to inhabitants: "20 counter-insurgents per 1,000 residents [or 1:50] is often considered the minimum troop density required for effective Coin operations".
The CIA estimates Afghanistan's population, as of July 2009, to be roughly 28.4 million. Thus, going by the 1:50 ratio, the size of the US-led coalition force would need to be approximately 568,000 troops.
The US military commitment to Afghan­istan stands at 68,000 troops. There are about 38,000 non-US troops in Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) also deployed in the country, including 9,000 from the UK. The expected US troop surge of up to 40,000 - the number McChrystal is said to be demanding - would take the total to only 146,000, or just over 400,000 troops short of the number needed to satisfy Coin's own textbook definition of "minimum troop density".
The Coinistas, however, claim that their ratio allows for the host nation's military and police forces to be included in the total figure.Would this make a difference? Even adding in the 97,000 Afghan police officers and the 100,000-odd Afghan soldiers leaves the Nato-led force more than 200,000 counter-insurgents short of the "minimum".
Furthermore, the Afghan National Army is plagued by desertion: 10,000 recruits have disappeared in recent months. Soldiers are under-equipped and underpaid; some 15 per cent of them are thought to be drug addicts. Dominated by Tajik troops from the north of the country, the "national" army has little or no credibility in the southern, Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, where the Taliban mainly operate, and from where they draw ethnic support.
Meanwhile, the Afghan police, one member of whom shot dead five British soldiers on 3 November, are prone to infiltration and corruption and lack proper training. They have lost roughly 1,500 staff to insurgent violence this year and around 10,000 policemen are absent without leave.
“The Afghan army is useless and the police are corrupt," says Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies. "So what does McChrystal propose? More useless troops and corrupt police. It's a counter-intuitive solution."
According to Plesch, there is a yawning gap between Coin theory and practice. "It's all fine on paper, but that doesn't translate into success on the ground," he told me. "You're still the foreign infidel with big boots on. You are still bombing, shooting and occupying."
But Coinistas are nothing if not optimistic, or even triumphalist. "Coin theorists tend to imply a kind of determinism: if Coin precepts are followed, the campaign can be successful," says Ward. Or, in the words of Vlahos: "Do this and then this, and at the right moment add this ingredient and . . . you win."
“For all its claims to novelty and modernity, Coin is eerily reminiscent of [the Napoleonic military thinker] Jomini at his worst - a list of prescriptive doctrines that claim to be valid for all times and places," says Colonel Douglas Macgregor, the retired senior military officer who commanded US cavalry troops during the first Gulf war.Macgregor, like Gentile, is critical of this latest plea from hawks to deploy US military force for utopian political ends. "We cannot 'fix' Afghanistan with military power, nor can we shape the destiny of hundreds of millions of Muslims living in the region. Only the people who live there can do that, because nations are built from within, not from without."
Taliban red herring
As a young officer in the Gurkhas, John Mackinlay experienced a conventional Maoist-style insurgency at first hand in the rainforests of North Borneo during the 1960s. But, as he argues in his new book, The Insurgent Archipelago, such experiences are of no use to modern counter-insurgents confronted with the threat of post-Maoist, globalised attacks. "Malaya is so long ago that it is not relevant," he told me.
“The Americans think they can take their fire extinguisher and go abroad to squirt some water, put out the blaze and go home," says Mackinlay, who teaches in the war studies department at King's College, London. "That's bollocks." The Taliban insurgency, he argues, is a red herring and sending more troops is a distraction. What matters, he says, is the al-Qaeda insurgency across the globe. Mackinlay distinguishes between what he calls an "expeditionary campaign" against insurgents in Afghanistan and the "domestic campaign" against extremists in the UK. His criticism of the obsession with Coin is that the domestic campaign should have "primacy" and that "the expeditionary campaign is antithetical to the domestic campaign, because it pisses off your average Muslim punter in Bolton".
The Taliban have no known interest in attacking mainland Britain (or America). Of the 15 major terror plots that UK security agencies have successfully prevented since 11 September 2001, none has been linked to Afghanistan. Of the 90 or so Islamists imprisoned in Britain on terrorism offences, not a single one hails from Helmand. On the contrary, Mackinlay tells me, "Afghanistan is the recruiting sergeant for what is happening in the UK."
As centre-left governments in the US and UK prepare to commit additional troops to the Afghan war effort, his words seem to go unheard. The Ministry of Defence plans to deploy 500 further British troops to the killing fields of Helmand and seems to have signed up fully to America's Coin approach, even publishing the first UK counter-insurgency manual in eight years.
One retired British colonel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is aghast. "It doesn't matter whether you send 500 troops or 5,000 troops," he says. "What is the point when there is no endgame and no exit strategy?"
Coin has become an oversimplified and superficial doctrine for fighting foreign battles, one that makes war a more attractive, easy and likely option, but is also enormously burdensome in troops and money. Nonetheless, such doctrines are seductive: Bill Clinton had liberal interventionism in Kosovo, George Bush fell back on neoconservatism over Iraq, and Barack Obama is on the verge of opting for Coin in Afghanistan.
Coin will not provide a silver - or even a lead - bullet in Afghanistan. And, even if its critics such as Gentile, Ward and Plesch are wrong, the counter-insurgency tactics of Petraeus and McChrystal in Kabul and Kandahar will do little to win hearts and minds here at home, or in the disaffected and alienated Muslim communities across Europe. It is this strategic truth that the Coinistas avoid at their peril.

Mr. Keillor's Thanksgiving

We now interrupt Mrs. Palin's book tour to bring you Thanksgiving, a grand old holiday, and we in the book business are thankful for her, that a busy woman who wanted to tell her story chose the medium of ink and paper between hard covers. Her tour is not about politics. It's about books.
Those big crowds waiting in the cold outside bookstores were looking forward to cozying up to her book and savoring the intense intimate pleasure of a memoir, the feeling that you and the author are close personal friends. You don't get that feeling from watching someone on TV; you get it from a book. Mrs. Palin's job was not to impress book reviewers or stake a claim to the Republican Party but to give pleasure to people who already love her, which evidently she did. Good for her.
And that's the challenge of Thanksgiving -- to gather among our kin who know us a little too well and have an amiable occasion enjoyed equally by all, at which nobody is stabbed through the heart with a carving knife.
We're a mobile and over-caffeinated people, and at every family gathering, amid the ancient aroma of turkey and sage and squash and sweet potatoes and a few pounds of butter, you'll find some edgy individualists, someone who knows the true story of what happened on 9/11, the story that the mainstream media have suppressed. A tea party devotee or two. Someone who believes that yeast is the secret of happiness. People capable of harangues and diatribes, but nobody wants this.
The family liberals smile at the family wingnuts. The vegetarian daughter-in-law produces her tofu loaf, which looks as if a large animal such as a buffalo came by and dropped it hot and steaming on the plate. We don't comment on this. She believes that the treatment of turkeys is a moral blight on America, but she does not say so. The Unitarian cousin listens to the fervent Lutheran prayer and murmurs Amen. The Viking fans and the Packer fans sit side by side.
It is the dinner of all dinners, generous and comforting and completely predictable, and a true test of civility, and we do it in gratitude for the simple goodness of life. Our consumer society is all about need and craving, and politics is so much about complaint and resentment, and here is a day devoted to something else.
My family gathers in the house that Dad built in 1947, by the fireplace that Great-Uncle Alfred, a stonemason, built when he was 80. He lived to be 90, and whenever you saw him and Aunt Millie, they were holding hands. Joining us will be cousin Dorothy Bacon, who recently told me that my grandfather James, who died before my time, loved to read and even out in the field raking hay with a team of horses he had a book in his hand; that he was often seen kissing Grandma; and that every night, until he was very old, he carried her in his arms up the stairs to bed. Good to know these things.
In my day, we went outdoors after dessert and ran off our dinner and when it was dark, were allowed back in the house, and we flopped down on the floor and listened to Uncle Lew tell about the night their house burned down in Charles City, Iowa, and afterward watched "The Bell Telephone Hour" on television with Robert Merrill and Patrice Munsel singing "Dear Hearts and Gentle People," and then a horn honked in the driveway and my sister came down from upstairs where she'd been primping in the bathroom and Mother said, "Tell him he has to come inside and pick you up, he can't sit in the car and honk." And so the boy came in. Sheepish, tongue-tied, hair oiled and swirled around on top, he stood as close to the door as possible and we inspected him as a potential relative and thought, "Naw. She could do better."