Patrisse Khan-Cullors: Over the last four and half years, we’ve seen BLM go from a phrase to a hashtag to a political platform to a movement. In the development of Black Lives Matter, we’ve seen the growth of black leadership and the rise of white nationalism. We’ve seen the rise of white men who have really invested time and energy in trying to undermine our movement. Part of the work that we’ve done is to remind people across the globe that black people are critical to the fabric of American democracy.
Books
The B&N Podcast: Daniel Pink
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
Ask almost anyone you know about how their mood changes during the course of the day, and you’ll get evidence that the way our minds and emotions respond to the clock is no small matter. But to according bestselling author Daniel Pink, the power of “chronobiology” is like an iceberg— we see only the small piece of its monumental role in shaping our days, our careers and our lives. He joins us in the studio to talk about his new book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
Daniel H. Pink, the #1 bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human, unlocks the scientific secrets to good timing to help you flourish at work, at school, and at home.
Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don’t know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of “when” decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork.
Timing, it’s often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science.
Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule? Why do certain breaks dramatically improve student test scores? How can we turn a stumbling beginning into a fresh start? Why should we avoid going to the hospital in the afternoon? Why is singing in time with other people as good for you as exercise? And what is the ideal time to quit a job, switch careers, or get married?
In When, Pink distills cutting-edge research and data on timing and synthesizes them into a fascinating, readable narrative packed with irresistible stories and practical takeaways that give readers compelling insights into how we can live richer, more engaged lives.
See more books by Daniel Pink.
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Photo of Daniel Pink (c) Nina Subin.
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Trump’s Debt to Ron Paul’s Paranoid Style
Though Ron Paul is often described as an orthodox libertarian, his ideology is more accurately described as paleolibertarian, which shares the limited government principles of traditional libertarianism but places a heavier emphasis on conservative social values, white racial resentment, and isolationist nationalism. It is, in many ways, a forerunner of today’s alt-right. The appeal of Paul and Trump to many Americans is not so much their specific policy ideas as their anti-establishment temperament and rhetoric, and, more specifically, a feverish anti-elitism that inevitably leads to conspiracy-mongering.
The Cutting-Edge Art of Matta-Clark
Within a very few years, he single-handedly established a new genre of environmental art, in which he used abandoned buildings as raw material and radically transformed them into stunning found sculptures. A prime example was Splitting: Four Corners (1974), in which he took an unoccupied wood-frame house in Englewood, New Jersey, and made a two-story-high vertical incision from the roof to its raised masonry foundation, which caused the rear half to lean back slightly, although the whole did not collapse.
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
Daniel Ellsberg and his colleague Harry Rowen slipped away from work at the Pentagon one afternoon in 1964 to see Stanley Kubrick’s madcap Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, which begins with an American general ordering an unauthorized nuclear attack against Russia and ends in Armageddon. They emerged from the theater in a daze, agreeing, in Ellsberg’s words, that what they had just seen “was, essentially, a documentary.”
Ellsberg worked for the RAND Corporation, a think tank that advises the U.S. Air Force, and for the Defense Department, in positions with high-level clearances that afforded him access to classified military intelligence unknown to almost anyone else in the world. He went on, in 1971, to leak the top-secret Pentagon Papers, which detailed decades of American involvement in Vietnam, in an attempt to hasten the end of the Vietnam War. (That story is told in Steven Spielberg’s recent film The Post.) In his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, the famous whistleblower reveals information that is even more unnerving, in this case about the jaw-dropping recklessness and deception inherent in our government’s nuclear program.
Ellsberg is now eighty-six, and his firsthand experience with government nuclear policy dates back nearly to the dawn of the nuclear era; he believes, however, based on available evidence, that little has changed in the ensuing decades. What shocked him most then, and what continues to vex him today, concerns the hidden purpose of our nuclear program and the widespread delegation of authority to initiate a nuclear strike.
It’s commonly believed that the purpose of our nuclear weapons program is to deter a nuclear first strike on the United States. Ellsberg argues that this is a fiction that our nuclear forces exist “to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia.” He explains, “This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them — U.S. threats of ‘first use’ — to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies.” Ellsberg lists twenty-five instances in which presidents from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton, usually in secret, threatened the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the midst of a non-nuclear conflict, including Nixon’s threats against the North Vietnamese and George H. W. Bush’s against Iraq. Barack Obama is the only president to have considered a “no first-use policy” regarding nuclear weapons, but he ultimately declined to adopt one. “Few Americans are aware of the extent to which the United States and NATO first-use doctrine has long isolated the United States and its close allies morally and politically from world opinion,” Ellsberg writes.
As for who has the power to launch a strike: during presidential elections, Americans are routinely asked to consider which candidate they would prefer have his or her finger on “the button.” Working for RAND during the Eisenhower administration, Ellsberg was astonished to learn that a number of lower commanders had been given the power to launch nuclear missiles; the common belief that only the president has access to a unique set of authorization codes is, Ellsberg claims, political theater. It would have to be, he reasons — if only the highest-ranking government official could launch nuclear weapons, then an adversary would need only pull off a “decapitating attack” on Washington in order to escape retaliation. It’s nerve-racking to think of blustery Donald Trump, not known for impulse control, having the ability to precipitate a nuclear conflict. (He has, Ellsberg drily notes, applied Nixon’s “madman theory” with “more plausibility than some of his predecessors.”) It’s equally unsettling to consider the unauthorized actions that could result from this widespread delegation, which, Ellsberg says, is precisely why it’s been hidden from the public.
The Doomsday Machine, as its subtitle suggests, has a confessional tone, as Ellsberg chronicles his involvement, as a onetime committed Cold Warrior, in drafting nuclear war plans during the administration of John F. Kennedy. (The book also includes a condensed but enlightening history of modern warfare, tracing the shattering of the longstanding international norm of not targeting civilians.) In 1961 the Joint Chiefs of Staff drafted a top-secret memo for Kennedy, estimating that a general nuclear war would result in 600 million deaths. Ellsberg, one of the few people to see the memo, was struck that there was “no shame, apology, or evasion” in the answer, no acknowledgement that the discussion was deranged. “That expected outcome exposed a dizzying irrationality, madness, insanity, at the heart and soul of our nuclear planning and apparatus,” he writes. It was then that his commitment began to waver.
What we have since learned about nuclear winter, the climatic effects that scientists expect would follow a nuclear war, makes clear that the numbers were extreme underestimates, that in fact a general nuclear war would likely bring about the destruction of human civilization. The United States and Russia both have the capability to bring about this destruction, with systems that are “still on hair-trigger alert” and are “susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch, or a desperate decision to escalate,” Ellsberg writes. He asks a question whose answer ought to be simple: “Does the existence of such a capability serve any national or international interest whatsoever to a degree that would justify its obvious danger to human life?” How much risk are we willing to tolerate, and for what purpose?
At the end of this alarming, galvanizing, and brilliantly written book, Ellsberg calls on “patriotic and courageous whistleblowers” to go public about nuclear dangers and urges readers to become more informed and engaged in order to pressure the government for change. He knows that the genie can’t be put back in the bottle, but he makes a strong argument that the purpose of nuclear weapons should be deterrence alone, a goal that the U.S. could meet with a “radically lowered” number of weapons. “This shift would not totally eliminate the dangers of nuclear war, but it would abolish the threat of nuclear winter,” he writes.
I lost track of how many times Ellsberg used the word insane as he described the existential threat under which we all knowingly live. The Doomsday Machine went to print before the president began threatening “fire and fury” against North Korea and before, as has been reported, he expressed a desire for a nearly tenfold increase in America’s nuclear arsenal. I expect that Ellsberg, and most anyone who reads this important book, would use the same word to describe these recent, worrying developments: insane.
Image of the Presidential Emergency Satchel (“Nuclear football”) from the Smithsonian Institution via Wikipedia.
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‘Studies In Power’: An Interview with Robert Caro
Many biographers working on a long project complain that their subject has eaten up their life. Did that happen to you?
Robert Caro: No. Because I don’t really regard my books as biographies. I’ve never had the slightest interest in writing a book to tell the life of a great man. I started The Power Broker because I realized that there was this man, Robert Moses, who had all this power and he had shaped New York for forty-four years. I regarded the book as a study of power in cities. After I finished that, I wanted to do national power. I felt I could learn about how power worked on a national level by studying Lyndon Johnson. I regard these books as studies in political power, not biography.
MLK Jr. Day Listening from the B&N Podcast
To mark today’s celebration of the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., the B&N Podcast is featuring recent episodes which explore and celebrate African-American history and America’s struggles for equality.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on We Were Eight Years in Power
Ta-Nehisi Coates talks with us about his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Knitting together some of the most vital essays the author has published over the past decade — including a profile of President Barack Obama, a searing indictment of destruction of the black family via the justice system, and Coates’s landmark “The Case for Reparations,” We Were Eight Years in Power takes readers along with Coates into a deep consideration of nothing less urgent than the fate of the nation.
Colson Whitehead on The Underground Railroad
In this in-depth conversation, Colson Whitehead talks with Miwa Messer about his dedication to writing from the point of view of “outsiders” and how his award-winning bestseller — and 2016 Oprah’s Book Club pick — The Underground Railroad went from idea to the page.
Yaa Gyaasi on Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi’s sweeping novel Homegoing begins with the divergent fates of two half-sisters in 18th Century Ghana, and weaves in the stories of their descendants across eight generations and three hundred years of history. The author talks with Miwa Messer about how a visit to a slave-trading castle on the West African coast inspired her ambitious and critically acclaimed debut.
Imbolo Mbue on Behold the Dreamers
For the novelist Imbolo Mbue, a scene glimpsed as she strolled through a bustling New York City neighborhood offered the inspiration for her first novel. Six years later, her novel Behold the Dreamers was tapped as the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick. In this episode the Cameroonian-American author talks with Bill Tipper about how her moving, timely tale of two very different families was born.
Kevin Young on Bunk
The poet and essayist Kevin Young joined us to talk about his new book Bunk: the Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News on the history of hoax and fraud — and how, in America, the most memorable of those seem inevitably tied up with our myths about race.
Jesmyn Ward on Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward’s writing marries a devastating realism with a unique sensitivity to the long echoes of violence and trauma.Her 2017 National Book Award-winning Sing, Unburied, Sing nods to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison with a tale of addiction, imprisonment, love and struggle — told by the living, the dying and by ghosts. Miwa Messer talks with Jesmyn Ward about her electric fiction and the lived experience behind it.
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The Assault on Reason
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, as United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying. But it is not merely facts that are under assault in the polarized politics of the US, the UK, and other nations twisting in the winds of populism. There is also a troubling assault on reason. Authoritarian tendencies know that warping the facts is only a start. Warping reason and logic and clarity of thought is the holy grail.
The Nuclear Worrier
Daniel Ellsberg in his youth and Daniel Ellsberg in his age are the same man—a born worrier quick to spot trouble, take alarm, and issue warning. He is best known for worrying about the American war in Vietnam, which time in the war zone convinced him was a crime, and for doing what he could to bring it to an end. In that case he copied and illegally released a huge collection of secret documents about the war, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. But Vietnam was not the first or the biggest thing that worried Ellsberg after he went to work in his late twenties as an analyst for the RAND Corporation in 1959. His first and biggest worry was the American effort to defend itself with nuclear weapons.
Between Nouveau and Deco
The imaginative fervor that gripped avant-garde master builders and artisans around 1900 in Vienna, the capital of the vast and culturally diverse Austro-Hungarian Empire, paralleled equally radical innovation in other creative realms, including the music of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, the painting of Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, and the writings of Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud. Yet the singular contributions to the visual arts that the Viennese made during this epoch have never loomed large enough in general chronicles of modernism.
Sig Nordal 