John Brown's Notes and Essays

From the Afghan debacle to his economic overreach, the White House has ample reason for alarm. Image from article: President Biden pauses while speaking at the White House, Sept. 24.  By Peggy Noonan , The Wall Street Journal , Sept. 30, 2021 6:43 pm ET The White House should be feeling alarm. It hasn’t been a good summer for the president, and it isn’t looking to be a good fall. The manner and timing of the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a catastrophe that left Americans infuriated and ashamed. The president’s statements and interviews in the aftermath were highly unsuccessful. The testimony of his top military leaders that they advised him to leave 2,500 troops to keep the process safe made him look dodgy. The whole thing was a botch from beginning to end, and it will stick in history. The images it yielded (kids running to the planes, 13 Americans killed as they tried to bring order) seemed to sum up the political moment, making this seem not like merely a bad event for the pre...

The historian Beverly Gage [ jb see ], who has run the Grand Strategy course since 2017, says the university failed to stand up for academic freedom amid inappropriate efforts to influence the curriculum.    “It’s very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in a situation where you are being second-guessed and undermined and not protected,” Beverly Gage said in explaining her decision to resign. Credit...Tess Ayano for The New York Times  By Jennifer Schuessler , The New York Times , Sept. 30, 2021 Updated 1:03 p.m. ET [ original article contains links and additional illustrations ]; see also Yale Daily News ,  The Washington Post . The New York Times , and letters to the NYT   The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy is one of Yale University’s most celebrated and prestigious programs. Over the course of a year, it allows a select group of about two dozen students to immerse themselves in classic texts of history and statecraft, while also rubbing shou...

 From Frank Bruni's (NYT columnist) newsletter (9/30/2021) via email Ben Wiseman I did not and will not crack open the cover of Stephanie Grisham’s White House memoir, but yesterday I read sneak peeks and synopses of it, and there was a moment — a horrifying moment — when I warmed to her. It was when I learned that Grisham, the White House press secretary from July 2019 to April 2020, used the book to characterize Jared Kushner as “Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit.” I wish that I’d come up with that line, back when I was regularly writing about Kushner and the whole miserable lot of them. I wish that Grisham had possessed the courage to call out Kushner in real time, when it mattered much more. But no. She was too busy savoring her perks, relishing her access, enjoying the roller coaster ride. She was in crowded company that way, and the size and tenacity of that crowd are what has always bothered me more than the reckless actions and rancid character of the president — I’ll spare y...

Three-dimensional printing can create nearly any object. A partnership in Mexico is putting that theory to the test, building a village for residents living in poverty. By Debra Kamin , The New York Times , 2021/09/2 [ original article contains links and striking illustrations ] 3-D printed houses in Nacajuca, Mexico.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times   Excerpt: Pedro García Hernández, 48, is a carpenter in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco, a rainforest-shrouded region of the country where about half of the residents live below the poverty line.   Hernandez image from article He ekes out a living making about 2,500 pesos ($125.17) a month from a tiny workspace inside the home he shares with his wife, Patrona, and their daughter, Yareli. The home has dirt floors, and during Tabasco’s long rainy season, it’s prone to flooding. Dust from his construction projects coats nearly everything in the home, clinging to the bedroom walls, the pump toilet and ...

Brady image from cited article “I would say 90 percent of what I say is probably not what I’m thinking.”  -- From: "Tom Brady Speaks His Mind [:] The most decorated quarterback in history is still at it, at age 44. Now he’s ready to let the world in more as he looks forward to life after football and launches an eponymous fashion brand."  By Jason Gay, The Wall Street Journal | Photography by Mario Sorrenti for WSJ, Sept. 28, 2021 6:55 am ET

   Kagan image  from Opinion by  Robert Kagan , Contributing columnist, The Washington Post , September 23, 2021 at 3:32 p.m. EDT A recent reaction to Kagan's essay by Washington Post commentator Daniel W. Drezner: "Over the weekend it was impossible for me to go on social media and not see someone linking or hyping Robert Kagan’s latest in The Washington Post.  ...   Kagan is not wrong — both elected leaders and appointed officials need to start thinking now about what can be done to minimize the threats posed to the Republic by the most dangerous former U.S. official since Aaron Burr." Another recent reaction: " Why the Fear of Trump May Be Overblown ." Excerpt from Kagan article:  “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.” — James Madison  The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years o...

Image from article: Trump and Putin shake hands in Helsinki, Finland, July 2018   How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline By Fiona Hill , Foreign Affairs , November/December 2021; via Dr. IL Excerpt:  In the very early years of the post–Cold War era, many analysts and observers had hoped that Russia would slowly but surely converge in some ways with the United States. They predicted that once the Soviet Union and communism had fallen away, Russia would move toward a form of liberal democracy. By the late 1990s, it was clear that such an outcome was not on the horizon. And in more recent years, quite the opposite has happened: the United States has begun to move closer to Russia, as populism, cronyism, and corruption have sapped the strength of American democracy. This is a development that few would have foreseen 20 years ago, but one that American leaders should be doing everything in their power to halt and reverse. Indeed, over time, the United S...

Fishermen checking their nets on the Amur river not far from the indigenous village of Sikachi-Alyan. Credit... Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times By Ben Ehrenreich , The New York Times , Sept. 24, 2021  Review of:  THE AMUR RIVER Between Russia and China By Colin Thubron  Travel writing is a complicated pleasure. Titillating stories of faraway lands date to at least as far back as the fifth century B.C., when Herodotus wrote of a goat-footed people far to the north, and of the cannibals beyond them. Ibn Battuta’s and Marco Polo’s accounts of their adventures in the 13th and 14th centuries are still widely read, but as a modern genre, travel writing would not take off for another few centuries, until European colonialism had opened Africa and Asia to assorted gentlemen — and occasional gentlewomen — travelers. Think of Sir Richard Francis Burton, who searched out the source of the Nile and visited Mecca disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, or T. E. Lawrence, he of “of-Ara...

Image from article, with caption:   Most living primates, such as lemurs and almost all monkeys, including the Geoffroy’s spider monkey, pictured, still have tails  Credit...Nick Fox/Alamy By Carl Zimmer , The New York Times , Published Sept. 21, 2021 Updated Sept. 22, 2021; see also  Excerpt:  TBXT was one of the first genes uncovered by scientists nearly a century ago. At the time, many researchers searched for genes by zapping animals, plants or microbes with X-rays, hoping that mutations would create a visible change.  In 1923, the Russian geneticist Nadezhda Dobrovolskaya-Zavadskaya X-rayed male mice and then allowed them to breed. She found that a few of them gained a mutation that caused some of their descendants to grow kinked or shortened tails. Subsequent experiments revealed that the mutation was on the TBXT gene. *** See: V. Korzh, "N. Dobrovolskaya-Zavadskaya and the Discovery of the T gene1," Published 2004  History  Medicine Russia...