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Teaching is Relationship Building—Something School Reformers Often Forget

by Mark Naison

One of the most damaging examples of the tunnel vision of so-called school reformers is the “school turnaround” concept incorporated  in the Obama Administration's “Race To the Top” legislation and currently being implemented in school districts throughout the nation.  “Turnaround” strategy  proposes  that a school designated as “failing”—invariably on test scores—be closed and either replaced with a charter school or reopened as a new school with a different principal and no more

Human Spaceflight Began Fifty Years Ago This Month, But Not Much Has Happened Lately

by Jonathan Coopersmith

Half a century ago on April 12, 1961, Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first person to reach outer space and orbit the Earth.  Eight years later the Space Race ended in an American victory when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon.   Since then, it's been all down hill for human space flight.   Racing to the moon in the 1960s was possible for two reasons:  First, major military investments—more than $12 billion by 1957 ($90 billion in today's do

Henry Johnson and an Honor Long Overdue

by Chad Williams

Ai Weiwei and Qingming: An Appeal to China

by Lionel M. Jensen

Ai Weiwei (as most readers of this blog should now know), perhaps China’s best-known artist and provocateur, is missing. Like so many other people of conscience and voice in the past two years, he is gone. Swallowed by the insatiable fear of the state’s authoritarian belly. It has been more than five days since his apprehension and his wife, Lu Qing, who was also detained and questioned has yet to hear from him; he is unreachable by phone because it was turned off by the police when he

Iran’s New Mahdism Da`wah Video: Letting Slip the Jinns of Jihad?

by Timothy R. Furnish

Recently the Islamic Republic of Iran put out a video entitled"The Coming Is Upon Us," wherein current events and personalities are explicated in terms of their alleged relevance to the arrival of the Mahdi, the"rightly-guided one" in Islam who will make the entire world Muslim. In Sunni doctrine, the true Mahdi has not yet appeared on Earth (despite the pro

“Long Since Passed the Level of Three Mile Island” – The Fukushima Crisis in Comparative Perspective

by Asia-Pacific Journal

As the crisis in Fukushima grows more serious (see reports here, here, and here), international scientific organizations have begun painting an increasingly dire picture of radiation releases from the plant.  The

Reports from Tohoku: Assessing Death, Dislocation, and Flight of the Victims Back

by Matthew Penney

LATEST UPDATE 3.30 (Japan Time) -- The extent of the destruction caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan has shocked the world. An official report on the 20th listed over 8277 dead and 12722 missing – a great majority in the hardest hit areas of northern Japan. The “dead” are the number of the bodies found by police and rescue workers. The “missing” are those reported missing by friends and family. W

Detroit Isn't Dead—But Tell That to the Media

by Kevin Boyle

Last week the United States Census Bureau announced that in the past ten years Detroit’s population had fallen by a staggering 25 percent.  The news swept through the national media, their stories almost always accompanied by suitably grim photographs:  in the New York Times a shot of two derelict houses standing on an otherwise empty block; in the Wall Street Journal the shell of a long-abandoned Packard plant; and on Time’s website an entire gallery of boar

The Atomic Bomb and "Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy"

by Yuki Tanaka

The devastating 9.0 earthquake that hit Japan on March 11, together with the following massive tsunami, completely destroyed the picturesque northeast coast of Japan's main island, taking potentially tens of thousands of lives and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees. Along this stretch of utter destruction sit four nuclear power stations, comprising a total of 15 reactors, within a distance of about 200 kilometers. Of these, the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power station, op

How to Write a Trilogy Without Really Trying

by Mary Beth Norton

The final book in a trilogy I have been working on since the 1970s (gasp!) is being published this spring, under the title Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Co

Irradiated Zone: Don’t Go There!

by Tom Engelhardt

“Seldom more than thrice annually did any layman or stranger travel the old road that passed the abbey, in spite of the oasis which permitted that abbey’s existence and which would have made the monastery a natural inn for wayfarers if the road were not a road from nowhere, leading nowhere, in terms of the modes of travel in those times.  Perhaps, in earlier ages, the road had been a portion of the shortest route from the Great Salt Lake to Old El Paso; south of the abb

We Are One: Remembering King’s Struggle for Labor Rights

by Michael Honey

“It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.  And I need not remind you this is our plight as a people all over America.” – Martin Luther King in Memphis, March 18, 1968April 4 marks forty-three years since an assassin killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis.  That date has special meaning this year. “We Are One” events all over the U.S. are fighting for collective bargaining rights, and more broadly, a reversal of

Channelling George Washington: The Forgotten Soldiers of World War I

by Thomas Fleming

“I’ve got a beef.  Isn’t that what you modern slang-slingers call a complaint?”“I used to hear the word a lot in my days in the Navy.  

A Proper Royal Wedding

by Charles Carlton

This Friday perhaps a billion people across the globe will watch the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton.  Why?Well, for one thing, it’ll be a good show.  The British always do

Can't We Afford to Teach Civics Any Longer? Can We Afford Not to?

by Richard Dreyfuss

"An American government exam taken by all high school students in Maryland would be eliminated next year under the proposed state budget, a surprising shift in policy that comes just three years after the test was made a graduation requirement. Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposal cuts $1.9 million from the Maryland State Department of Education budget that would pay for the test and its grading. ... Some educators expressed immediate concern that social studies would get less attention in high schoo

Haley Barbour’s “Nixon to China” Opportunity on Race

by Chris Myers Asch

“Run, Haley, Run!” cry many conservatives searching for a champion in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Channelling George Washington: The Greatest American General

by Thomas Fleming

“Who was the greatest American general?”“That’s a VERY large question. Robert E. Lee?”“A lot of people think so. But I feel his rep

Some Sociological Uses of History

by Herbert J. Gans

For a sociologist, or at least this one, history is of two kinds; one which deliberately studies the past to shed light on the present, and the other which recounts and analyzes the past as an end in itself.  Although the dichotomy is fuzzy and the labels I attach to it are inelegant, I think of the first as present-oriented and the second as past-oriented history. One can subdivide this dichotomy further: among other things, from the historians' and the readers' perspective

Obama in Latin America: So Not Nixon

by Alan McPherson

President Obama is not the only high-profile U.S. official to have kicked around a soccer ball in Latin America, as he did in Brazil a few days ago. When Vice President

What Can Air Power Achieve? From Rolling Thunder to Odyssey Dawn

by Matt Jacobs

With his recent decision to launch Operation Odyssey Dawn, the code name for the airstrikes against Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, President Obama joined a long line of American leaders who have chosen air power as a tool of foreign policy.  But the use of air power without clear objectives has rarely proven an effective choice.  And, unfortunately, the lack of clear objectives is exactly what we are seeing today.  Obama has repeatedly stated that Gadhafi must go, but then he q