I am not worried about the rise of the cultural conservatives. I am worried about the disappearance of an internationalist, pro-American business elite.

Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement? Somebody said to me the other day that the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

Samantha Test, 27, is the proud owner of the Cadillac of area codes, San Francisco's 415. It has enormous cachet.

The data show that what matters on the happiness front is not how much money you have, but whether you have more (or less) at any given time than everyone else.

The mediocrity of American public schools ... breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Time abuse is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. It is therefore impossible to cure a person of time abuse by actually managing his time. Instead, you must understand your time abuser's need for control and fear of evaluations.

The most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation's prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms.

Gray matter is the new black of the hip social scene.

In the New Dating Scene, the Attraction Is a Beautiful Mind

I recently pulled my beloved copy of A Jacques Barzun Reader from the shelf and cracked it open to a random page. This is always a reliable recipe for enjoyable reading, and this was no exception. I landed on the essay linked here, which happens to have been published in 1986 as the Sixth Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture on Ethics and Foreign Policy.

While it was written in the age of the Cold War, not long after Donald Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam Hussein, it fits presciently into the present context of American troubles in post-Saddam Iraq.

Cultural historian Jacques Barzun argues that democracy is not an ideology that can be exported but a historical development and mode of life peculiar to the political context in which it developed. Extrapolating from this, we can say that attempts to base a foreign policy on the idea of exporting democracy—as sought by both the Reagan and Clinton administrations -- will forever be doomed to failure.

A Silver Star, at least, for this essay.

For the book as a whole, see the post linked above, in which the critical praise pours forth as water in a flood:

staggering, legendary, outstanding, inventive, insightful, impressive, a feast, engaging, intelligent, challenging, satisfying, elegant.

You might also want to check out The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building, recommended here in February.

Is Democratic Theory for Export?

Type “college prank” into YouTube and you will find hundreds of videos. Most will be really, really dumb. But just once in a while ...

The College Prank as Viral Video

Is our focus on happiness in contemporary culture taking us closer to our coveted end? Or does our self-conscious striving and frenetic pursuit signal something else?

The Pursuit of Happiness in Perspective

In light of recent events ...

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Here is a good example of a sentence begging to be misunderstood. The idea behind it is at least half right, although it would have no force unless it was partly wrong.

...

When he actually had enough to say that he wanted to be understood, Rilke turned out sentences that you could write a book about.

Fame is not only the sum of the misunderstandings that can grow around a name, it also depends on the understandings that do not grow around it.

...

Lindbergh tested high-performance aircraft, probably shot down a Japanese aircraft in combat, pioneered long-distance routes for Pan Am, and generally lived out a productive life. His fame is in two parts, like Brecht's: He is the hero and the villain. For the thoughtful, it is in three parts: He is also one of the first victims of the celebrity culture. (There would have been no kidnapping if he had not been so publicized.) But it ought to be in at least four, because behind all the personae determined by events there was a personality that remained constant. He valued self-reliance, possibly too much: It made him hate collectivism so blindly that he thought fascism was the opposite, instead of the same thing in a dark shirt. Yet there is something magnificent about a man who could make a success out of any task he tackled. To complete Rilke's observation —— and it is an observation, because it answers visible facts —— we must accept this much: To measure the distortion of life we call fame, it is not enough to weigh the misunderstandings against the understandings. We have to see through to the actual man and decide whether, like so many artists, he is mainly what he does, or whether he has an individual and perhaps even inexpressible self, like the lonely flyer.

Fame

HIV/AIDS in South Africa: the virus now infects 5.5m people, affects many millions more and kills close to 1,000 people every day.

The long journey of a young democracy

IDC estimates that by 2010, about 70 percent of the world's digital data will be created by individuals.

Tech Researchers Calculate Digital Info

"We wanted the best, but it turned out as always."

-- Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russian prime minister, 1992-1998; now, a billionaire oligarch

Found in a recent review of "House of Meetings", by Martin Amis:

Chernomyrdin was referring to a disastrous episode in the Kremlin's attempts at economic reform that he oversaw in the early 1990s, and his statement has become a popular sardonic proverb among Russians.

See also:

Not every country can count on its prime ministers for comic relief.
But then again, not every country is Russia.

And on page 386 of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, By Andrew Meier.

Worth your time.

Thomas C. Schelling held his Prize Lecture December 8, 2005, at Beijersalen, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. He was presented by Professor Jörgen Weibull, Member of the Prize Committee for Economic Sciences.

Video and full text (in PDF) are available. The lecture was also published in PNAS and is freely accessible (in HTML, PDF) there.

An excerpt:

They will discover—I hope they will discover—over weeks of arguing, that the most effective use of the bomb, from a terrorist perspective, will be for influence. Possessing a nuclear device, if they can demonstrate possession—and I believe they can, if they have it, without detonating it—will give them something of the status of a nation. Threatening to use it against military targets, and keeping it intact if the threat is successful, may appeal to them more than expending it in a destructive act. Even terrorists may consider destroying large numbers of people and structures less satisfying than keeping a major nation at bay.

An astonishing 60 years: The legacy of Hiroshima | Thomas Schelling Nobel Prize Lecture