Book Review: The Strangers Within Us

BY LINA DELZOVICH

In March 1953, a healthy 28-year-old woman donated blood at a clinic in northern England. As technicians tried to determine her blood type, they could hardly believe what they saw. The woman, identified as Mrs. McK, had both type O and type A red blood cells. The results contradicted a central paradigm of 20th century medicine, which stated that people can only have one blood type — A, B, AB, or O.

When Robert Race, a blood-type specialist in London, received the findings, he revealed that the case wasn’t unprecedented. About a decade earlier, American biologist Ray Owen stumbled on a similar phenomenon not in humans, but in cows, in which — due to the shared placental blood circulation — twin calves had two different types of blood cells.

When asked, Mrs. McK divulged that she had a twin brother who died young. Almost 30 years later, she was still carrying her twin’s cells inside her body. The revelation was so discombobulating that Race described Mrs. McK as a “chimera,” referring to a monstrous creature from Greek mythology with a head and forequarters of a lion, a goat’s head on its back, and a serpent for a tail.

This is only one of many mind-boggling and fascinating examples of cellular trickery described by French science journalist Lise Barnéoud in “Hidden Guests: Migrating Cells and How the New Science of Microchimerism Is Redefining Human Identity.” A biological phenomenon, microchimerism refers to the presence of a small number of cells from one individual within another genetically distinct individual. It most commonly occurs during pregnancy when fetal cells escape into the mother’s bloodstream or maternal cells sneak into the placenta, eventually becoming part of the embryo or fetus. Likewise, twins may exchange cells before birth, too.

The cases aren’t that rare. “Approximately 8 percent of fraternal twins and 21 percent of fraternal triplets carry blood cells from their companions in utero,” Barnéoud writes, citing a 2020 review. Similarly, fetal cells that wander outside the placenta can persist in the mother’s body for years, genomic scientist Diana Bianchi discovered decades after Mrs. McK’s case, in 1993. Bianchi and her team found male cells in the blood of six women who had given births to sons from one to 27 years earlier. Male cells are easier to spot in women because they have X and Y chromosomes in their cell nucleus while female cells have two X chromosomes, and the Y chromosome stands out. But males can carry foreign cells too.

These wandering cells can settle anywhere in the body, making up “a tiny fraction of a kidney, for example, or the entire organ,” Barnéoud reveals. Some have been known to make a home in lungs and others in livers. Moreover, “microchimeric cells can cross the blood-brain barrier and take up permanent residence in our command center,” Barnéoud writes. A 2012 study of 54 deceased women referenced in the book found that 63 percent had male cells in their brains. And one far-fetched hypothesis even posits that women may also acquire foreign cells through semen. So, “if you don’t want to wind up with a head full of cells from multiple men, you’d better use protection!” writes Barnéoud.

Microchimerism refers to the presence of a small number of cells from one individual within another genetically distinct individual. It most commonly occurs during pregnancy.

“Mothers likely carry their children’s cells within them for the rest of their lives,” according to Barnéoud. Children may be carrying their parents. If your mother’s cells sneaked in, clinging to you while you were in utero, you may still harbor them. Bianchi found that maternal cells migrated into their offspring’s thymus, thyroid, liver, skin, and spleen. “So you think your mother is always looking over your shoulder?” Barnéoud quotes Judith Hall, a pediatrician and geneticist who wrote an editorial commenting on Bianchi’s findings, as saying. “She may be in your shoulder.”

Moreover, researchers now hypothesize that even your grandmother’s cells may be lurking in your body, passed on from your mother. It seems that a lot of us may be chimeras, not only Mrs. McK.

However, Barnéoud argues that by using the term “chimeric,” scientists did a great disservice to the cells, instantly casting them as villains. Understandably, they were shocked because Mrs. McK defied the laws of immunology at the time, which stated that a healthy immune system can’t tolerate foreign cells. Eventually, chimeric cells lived up to their reputation: In the mid-1990s, scientists implicated them in autoimmune diseases, which disproportionately affect women.

Sometimes, it seems, the immune system may decide to go after them, causing increased inflammation. (Except in this case the term “autoimmune” doesn’t apply because the cells indeed are foreign and the body isn’t attacking itself.) And so “these cells became migrants, intruders, vagrants crossing the placental border and colonizing, invading, or squatting on maternal territory,” Barnéoud writes. In medicine, it seems, the concept of “us” and “them” is just as dominant as in politics and wars.

It took time to realize that the “invading” cells can come in peace — and even bring benefits. Early in this millennia, scientists learned that microchimeric cells can repair wounds by forming skin and blood vessels. They also can heal heart damage; when injected into mice after a heart attack, they find a way to the damaged heart parts and fix them. And in post-mortem findings of a child who had diabetes, researchers discovered maternal cells were producing insulin in the pancreas, decreeing that the cells were likely helping to “restore function and regenerate diseased tissue.”

And just like that, the chimeric cells “have gone from being suspicious vagrants to productive immigrants, naturalized — in the political sense of the term — to their new home,” Barnéoud quotes historian of science Aryn Martin as saying.

Told in beautiful, sometimes bordering on poetic, language with occasional snark and humor thrown in, the book upends some of the very foundations of medicine, immunology, and genetics. And, having been rooted in cutting-edge research, it rocks our philosophical concept of self. A discovery that the microbial cells in our body may outnumber our own, made us realize we’re only partially human. Now comes the second blow to our ego — we aren’t fully one-human either. “Twenty years after the microbial upheaval, another is underway: even the human half of us does not solely consist of our ‘I,’” Barnéoud’s observes.

“The idea of an entirely independent individual self-constructed from a single fertilized egg is a myth.”

Clever chapter names — “The Other in Me,” “The Other Mes” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” — make you question your biological composition. You can’t help but wonder where all these “others of you” came from and how they interact with one another — and yourself. Instead of a single, uniform genome defining your biological identity, you begin to see yourself as something greater than just you.

“The idea of an entirely independent individual self-constructed from a single fertilized egg is a myth,” Barnéoud concludes. That myth may bode well with the ideals of modern Western societies, where we prioritize the individual’s rights over the needs of a collective, but in this new, emerging biological reality, no human is a true individuum. We all are living communities of cells — some ours, some ancestral, some microbial — all of which are in perpetual flux that sometimes results in health and sometimes disease.

Instead of being battlegrounds of “us” and “them,” our bodies operate on never-ending negotiations, tolerating and benefiting from genetic strangers within. “We are each of us a collective in constant co-construction,” Barnéoud resolves, “and our equilibrium depends on the interactions of our constituents.”

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What Could Have Stopped Hitler — And Didn’t

The German foreign minister Walter Rathenau was everything the Weimar Republic’s nationalist right wing hated: Jewish, rich, a staunch supporter of the young German democracy and actively working for reparations with the Allies. He was murdered in 1922. Credit...Bettmann, via Getty Images

BY CASEY SCHWARTZ

On a rainy morning in June 1922, Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister, rode out of his Berlin villa in an open convertible. As his chauffeur slowed at a curve, a second car overtook them. A man in a long leather coat raised his pistol and shot Rathenau five times. For good measure, a second assassin threw a hand grenade into Rathenau’s car. The blast lifted the foreign minister from his seat.

Rathenau was everything Germany’s nationalist right wing hated: Jewish, rich, a staunch supporter of the young German democracy and actively working to reach an agreement over World War I reparations with the Allies. His death reverberated throughout the country and beyond. When Franz Kafka heard the news, he bitterly responded that he was surprised the murder hadn’t happened sooner, it was “so very much part of Jewish and German destiny.”

“Political murder was the order of the day in the early Weimar Republic,” the German historian Volker Ullrich writes in his new book, “Fateful Hours.” Violence was a fact of Weimar life. Assassinations, coups, occupation — all of these storms and more hit the young, wobbly German republic in just the first four years of its existence. And yet, not only did the Weimar Republic survive its early challenges, Ullrich argues, but its demise was never inevitable, even as late as January 1933 — the month Adolf Hitler became chancellor.

Ullrich, translated here by Jefferson Chase, is not the first to make this argument; he follows in the footsteps of the many scholars who have set their sights on Weimar over the years, among them Peter Gay, Eric Weitz and, most recently, Harald Jähner. But Ullrich breaks new ground, laying out his case in illuminating granularity, moving inch by inch through the political machinations that began with the establishment of Germany’s first democratically elected government, in 1919, and ended with the chancellorship of Hitler.

And much more so than in any of his previous books, which include a two-volume biography of Hitler, Ullrich explicitly positions “Fateful Hours” as exemplar and warning for our own perilous, norm-shattering times. “It’s in our hands to decide whether democracy fails or survives,” he writes.

Friedrich Ebert, the German democracy’s first president, came from the left. His Social Democrats faced deep-seated opposition: a bulky coalition of discontents forced into unlikely alliances — while the Social Democrats themselves relied on the right-wing Freikorps to put down armed rebellions.

Ullrich emphasizes that the Social Democrats didn’t do enough to fundamentally change German society while they could. By 1925, Ebert was dead, and a former officer of the Imperial German Army, Paul von Hindenburg, had triumphed in the national elections. This victory, celebrated by the right, was one of the major inflection points in the nation’s fate. It would be Hindenburg who appointed Hitler, however reluctantly, to the chancellorship.

Ullrich summons a chorus of eyewitnesses along the way to this apocalyptic outcome, including the noted diarist Victor Klemperer and Sebastian Haffner, whose memoir, “Defying Hitler,” is one of the masterpieces of the era. It is Haffner who gives the most indelible description of the nation-shaking hyperinflation that hit the young republic in 1923. In the face of this profound economic instability, experience and expertise also lost their value, and the young and quick-witted sprang up to displace their elders. “The 21-year-old bank director appeared on the scene,” Haffner wrote. “He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties and supported his embarrassed father.” Haffner, like his contemporaries Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann, saw a direct path from the trauma of inflation to the triumph of Nazism exactly 10 years later.

Many histories of the Weimar Republic bask in the cultural fermentation occurring in those years: the extraordinary movements happening in painting, in cinema, in sex. Ullrich barely mentions these aspects of Weimar life, most of which were in any event centered in Berlin. By focusing so narrowly on Germany’s politics, he gives the reader an ominously clear view of the step-by-step buildup to Nazism, and all of the moments it could have been stopped, but wasn’t.

What might have been done to alter its brutal ascension, from the dangerous flexibility of Article 48 to grant rule by emergency decree to the fallout from the Great Depression? Ullrich tells us, insistently, that history is ultimately decided by individual people, while giving a curious minimum of detail as to who these individuals actually were. Of Friedrich Ebert, we hear only that he was formerly a “saddler” whose lack of higher education annoyed the Wilhelmine elites. And this is more character development than we get for most.

Instead, what becomes apparent in Ullrich’s fine-grained political ticktock is how much was decided by chance and luck. For example, Hindenburg’s 1932 decision to dissolve the Brüning cabinet came at a time when the German economy was still in tatters, and the radical National Socialist Party held more appeal to the populace than it might have just two years later when Reichstag elections would have otherwise been held.

Still, though the main players may remain psychologically opaque, the road map to authoritarian disaster is laid out here in gleamingly sinister detail by a historian who knows the period as well as anyone could. And the playbook is only too familiar. One of the Nazis’ first targets was school curriculums. They managed to ban the antiwar classic “All Quiet on the Western Front” three years before Hitler was installed as chancellor in the Reichstag.

The parallels to our own moment aren’t perfect, but they are resonant enough to make us ask, once again, who or what it will take for us to save ourselves.

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Prince Andrew Stripped Of All Titles After Virginia Giuffre’s Memoir. Her Family Declares ‘Victory’

BY KATE CANTRELL

SENIOR LECTURER, WRITING, EDITING

AND PUBLISHING, UNIVERSITY OF 

SOUTHERN QUEENSLAND

Content warning: this article includes graphic details about sexual assault some readers may find distressing.

Prince Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, including prince, and will move out of his home, Royal Lodge, to a private residence. Buckingham Palace issued a statement today that King Charles has initiated a formal process to remove the “style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew”, who “will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor”.

The decision comes in the wake of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, published this fortnight. The memoir includes an inside account of the two years Giuffre spent as a “sex slave” working for Jeffrey Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre died by suicide in April this year, aged 41, on her farm in Western Australia.

Three weeks before she died, she emailed her co-author, journalist Amy Wallace, and longtime publicist Dini von Mueffling: “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released.”

“Today,” Giuffre’s family said, “she declares a victory. She has brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage”.

British historian and author Andrew Lownie (author of a book about Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, called Entitled), told Sky News earlier this month, “the only way the story will go away is if [Andrew] leaves Royal Lodge, goes into exile abroad with his ex-wife, and is basically stripped of all his honours, including Prince Andrew”. Sarah Ferguson will also move out of Royal Lodge.

As a trauma memoir, Nobody’s Girl forces us to bear witness to an uncomfortable truth: Giuffre’s abuse was hidden in plain sight.

“Don’t be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn’t know what Epstein was doing,” she writes. “Anyone who spent any significant amount of time with Epstein saw him touching girls.” She continues: “They can say they didn’t know he was raping children. But they were not blind.”

Four days before the memoir was published, Prince Andrew announced he would no longer use the titles conferred upon him, including Duke of York. Three days later, leaked emails from 2011 suggested he gave Giuffre’s date of birth and social security number to one of his protection officers, hours before the infamous photograph of him with her was published.

Maxwell’s brother, Ian Maxwell, published an article in the Spectator today, headlined “Don’t take Virginia Giuffre’s memoir at face value”. The memoir keeps his sister, who was convicted of charges including sex trafficking of a minor, in world headlines – at a time Donald Trump has said he will “take a look” at pardoning her. Earlier this year, Maxwell was moved to a lower security prison to continue her 20-year sentence.

Allegations of parental abuse

Giuffre writes that her father began molesting her at the age of seven. He “strenuously” denies this. While the memoir makes this public for the first time, Giuffre’s older brother Danny Wilson told ABC’s 7.30 he first heard the allegations years before the memoir was published – and confronted his father about it.

Giuffre regularly wet her pants at school – earning her the cruel nickname “Pee Girl”. She recalls: “I began to get painful urinary tract infections. My infections were so severe, I couldn’t hold my urine.”

After one (of several) medical examinations, a doctor told her mother her primary school aged daughter’s hymen was broken. Giuffre writes of this moment:

My mother didn’t hesitate. ‘Oh, she rides horses bareback,’ she explained. That was the end of that. I didn’t even know what a hymen was.

Later, she recalls her mother raising suspicions about her involvement with Epstein and “apex predator” Maxwell, questioning “what this older couple wanted with a teenage girl who had no credentials”.

Giuffre writes: “I guess I was glad she cared enough to have suspicions, but at the same time, wasn’t it a little late for that? I knew she couldn’t save me; she’d never saved me before.”

Around the time of her doctor’s visit, the memoir alleges, Giuffre’s father began “trading” his daughter to a friend – a tall, muscular man with “a military bearing” who was also abusing his own stepdaughter. In 2000, the man was convicted of molesting another girl in North Carolina. He spent 14 months in prison and a decade as a registered sex offender.

Giuffre writes that she was abused by these men for five years, from ages seven to eleven; it only stopped when she began menstruating.

Heartbreakingly, Giuffre discloses that at one point she imagined Maxwell (or “G-Max” as she wanted to be known) as her mother: “While I was hardly equipped to judge, it often seemed to me that Epstein and Maxwell behaved like actual parents.” Among other things, the pair gave Giuffre her first cell phone, whitened her teeth, and taught her how to hold a knife and fork “just so”.

‘The younger, the better’

Giuffre’s memoir is a courageous and clear-eyed account of what trauma takes – and what recovery demands.

Told in four chronological parts – “Daughter”, “Prisoner”, “Survivor” and “Warrior” – the memoir meticulously records the “sexual assaulting, battering, exploiting, and abusing” Giuffre endured throughout her life, most notably at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell.

The result is a devastating exposé of the fetishisation and abuse of girls – “the younger, the better”, Epstein said – and society’s failure to protect the most vulnerable.

It is also a damning indictment of everyone who knew and looked away.

‘Please don’t stop reading’

Giuffre was 16 and working as a locker-room attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her to “service Epstein”, under the pretence of training as a masseuse. (In October 2007, Trump – who is portrayed favourably in the memoir – reportedly banned Epstein from his resort after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member.)

Over the next two years, and roughly 350 pages, Giuffre tells how she was trafficked to “a multitude of powerful men”, including Prince Andrew, French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, a prominent psychology professor and a respected United States senator.

Giuffre’s original memoir manuscript was titled “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club”.

In one of the most distressing scenes, Giuffre describes how she was trafficked to “a former minister”, who raped her so “savagely” she was left “bleeding from [her] mouth, vagina, and anus”. When Virginia told Epstein about the brutal attack, which made it hurt to breathe and swallow, he said, “You’ll get that sometimes.”

Eight weeks later, he returned Giuffre to the politician, who this time abused her on one of Epstein’s private jets. In the US version of the memoir, the politician is described not as a “former minister”, but as “a former Prime Minister”.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Giuffre writes. “The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. But please don’t stop reading.”

One of the most devastating revelations comes toward the end of the memoir. Giuffre – now in her forties – receives a phone call from a confidant claiming to have evidence that Epstein paid off her father when she was a girl. In 2000, when Epstein and Maxwell started abusing the teenager at El Brillo Way, it is alleged that her father accepted “a sum of money” from the paedophile.

According to Giuffre, when she confronted her father, there was “a brief silence” before “he started yelling at [her] for being an ungrateful daughter”.

Of all the betrayals she endured, this one stands alone: “I will never get over it”.
Girls no one cared about

“When a molester shows his face,” Giuffre writes, “many people tend to look the other way.”

In chapter 11, Giuffre describes how Epstein’s personal chef, the celebrity cook Adam Perry Lang, made her her favourite food – pizza. This, apparently, became something of a tradition – Lang feeding Giuffre, but never “ogl[ing]”, “even if I was standing naked in front of him, which was not unusual”. She wrote: “When I’d finished attending to Epstein or one of the other guests, Lang would have a cheesy hot pie waiting.”

In 2019, Lang issued a statement about working for Epstein: “My role was limited to meal preparation. I was unaware of the depraved behavior and have great sympathy and admiration for the brave women who have come forward.”

In another scene, Giuffre reveals that Epstein “never wore a condom”. After falling pregnant at the age of 17, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy.

On this day, Giuffre recalls how Epstein and Maxwell (“two halves of a wicked whole”) – with the help of Epstein’s New York butler – drove her to hospital after she woke in “a pool of blood”. Epstein lied to the doctor about her age, Giuffre alleges, and the two men seemed to enter “a gentlemen’s agreement” in which “whatever was going on between this middle-aged man and his teenage acquaintance […] would be kept quiet”.

“We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care,” Giuffre writes. “At times I think he even believed he cared.” She describes how Epstein “threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better.” As a self-described “pleaser” who “survived by acquiescing”, Giuffre writes that Epstein and Maxwell “knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein” her childhood abusers had: abuse cloaked in “a fake mantle of ‘love’.”

Sex as birthright

In March 2001, at Maxwell’s upscale townhouse in London’s Belgravia – where Prince Andrew was famously pictured with his arm around the teenager – Giuffre recalls how Maxwell invited Andrew to guess her age. When the prince correctly guessed 17, he reportedly told her, “My daughters are just a little younger than you.”

Later that night, she writes, Prince Andrew bought the teenager cocktails at Tramp – an exclusive London nightclub – where she and the prince danced awkwardly and the prince “sweated profusely”. In the car, on the way home, Maxwell instructed Giuffre “to do for [Andy] what you do for Jeffrey”.

In November 2019, in his calamitous interview with BBC’s Newsnight, Prince Andrew denied any wrongdoing, claiming he had “no recollection of ever meeting this lady”. He told presenter Emily Maitlis he could not have danced sweatily at Tramp because he had “a peculiar medical condition” that prevented perspiration, caused by what he described as “an overdose of adrenaline” in the Falklands War.

In that interview, Andrew admitted his decision to stay at Epstein’s New York home in December 2010 – months after Epstein was released from jail for soliciting and procuring minors for prostitution – was “the wrong thing to do”. However, the prince claimed his decision was “probably coloured by [his] tendency to be too honourable”.

In her memoir, Giuffre describes Andrew as “friendly enough but entitled” – “as if he believed having sex with [her] was his birthright.” She alleges she had sex with the prince on two more occasions.

The last word

Publishing a book posthumously can be an ethical minefield. Critics often question whether posthumous publication is what the author would have wanted. They point to the author’s right to protect their work and their literary reputation – a right that cannot survive them.

However, Giuffre left no space for speculation. In the email she sent her co-author and publicist before her death, she made her wishes clear:

It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time. The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals.

As the memoir progresses, Giuffre’s health spirals. The physical, emotional and mental toll of trauma closes in on her. Epstein is dead. Maxwell is in prison. But Giuffre is still “trapped in an invisible cage”.

“From the start,” she says, “I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.”

Before she died, Giuffre made a promise to her husband and children that she would try with “all her might” to believe her life mattered. Her final goal was to prevent “the emotional time-bomb” inside her from detonating.

While Giuffre may at last be beyond harm, the truth remains. She – like the hundreds of girls abused by Epstein and his associates – was wronged.

Her fight, like theirs, transcends death: release the Epstein files; hold abusers and their enablers accountable; expose the systems that protect predators; abolish statutes of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors. Ensure no other child suffers. This is what Giuffre wanted.

By publishing her memoir, she ensured the fight would survive her. She made certain her voice would outlast her pain.

In this way, she got the last word.

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A Key Lesson Of The Cuban Missile Crisis? The U.S. Needs Allies

BY RENATA KELLER

It appears that America's leaders have forgotten the value of alliances. In the past few months alone, the United States has threatened neighbors across Latin America, carried out airstrikes on vessels in nearby international waters, bullied European leaders and abandoned NATO allies, and intentionally destroyed the aid programs that earned it goodwill in Africa. Ironically, it was those same regions that helped the United States peacefully resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis back in October 1962. The anniversary of the crisis offers an opportunity to remember how U.S. allies in Latin America, Europe, and Africa helped save the world from nuclear Armageddon.

On Oct. 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union had secretly stationed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba that could reach most of the United States and Latin America. He decided to set up a naval quarantine around Cuba to pressure Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles. Kennedy’s plan depended on coordinated action with the United States’ Latin American allies in the Organization of American States (OAS). Kennedy needed the OAS to establish the quarantine and give it legal legitimacy. Otherwise, under international law, the quarantine would be deemed an act of war.

Days later, on Oct. 22, Kennedy went on live television and revealed the danger of the Soviet missiles to the U.S. public and the entire world. He called for an immediate meeting of the OAS to invoke articles 6 and 8 of the Rio Treaty to establish the quarantine in defense of hemispheric security. The next day, representatives from all OAS member countries gathered in Washington, D.C., to discuss the crisis. Every single member country supported Kennedy’s proposal for a quarantine established under the auspices of the Rio Treaty.

The unanimous OAS vote gave the quarantine the international, hemispheric, and collective legal foundations it required to be accepted in the court of world opinion. Latin American support sent a clear message to the rest of the world that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were a matter of hemispheric security—not merely the latest tit-for-tat escalation in U.S. Cold War tensions with Cuba or the Soviet Union. Allies in Latin America thus helped Kennedy keep the moral high ground and portray the Soviets as unwelcome aggressors.

Latin American countries contributed to and participated in the hemispheric security effort in other ways as well. Argentina and Venezuela each provided two destroyers and airplanes; Venezuela contributed its only submarine to the quarantine. Costa Rica and Haiti made their port facilities available to ships participating in the quarantine, while the Dominican Republic offered ships, and Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras offered their air and naval bases. The combined forces of the OAS member countries formed the Inter-American Quarantine Task Force 137 under the direction of the commander of the South Atlantic Force based in Trinidad. This combined naval force helped the United States patrol the seas around the Caribbean, forming the southernmost part of the quarantine line.

The fact that so many Latin American nations showed solidarity with the United States and participated in the quarantine sent a clear message to Castro and to the Soviets. Soviet general Anatoli Gribkov recalled years later that the Soviets had received intelligence reports that “among the six or seven divisions that were getting ready to attack Cuba, there were Argentine forces, Venezuelan forces, and forces from the Dominican Republic, and military support was ready to come from Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, Honduras, Haiti, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.” The coordinated efforts of multiple Latin American countries and their joint participation in the quarantine gave the Soviets the impression that Cuba was surrounded by enemies ready to strike if the missiles were not removed promptly.

While NATO allies in Europe were farther from the main theater of action, they also helped defend the U.S. position in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The leaders of France, Great Britain, and West Germany promptly sided with the United States. British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan publicly denounced Soviet duplicity. He argued that had Kennedy accepted the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, U.S. passivity would have cast doubt on American pledges around the globe and exposed “the entire Free World to a new series of perils.” West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told radio and television audiences that the crisis represented the greatest threat to world peace since 1945 and pledged “the full support of the West German people” to the U.S. effort to remove the missiles. NATO support was especially important, as European countries were the ones most exposed to possible retaliation from nuclear missiles in the Soviet Union.

While Latin American allies helped establish and maintain the naval quarantine around Cuba, and NATO countries supported the U.S. geopolitical position, two important West African countries also supported the United States in less public ways. Even with the naval quarantine in place, the U.S. military warned Kennedy that the Soviets could still fly atomic warheads into Cuba. Their planes, however, would need to refuel in West Africa. The only countries with large enough airfields and refueling stations were Guinea and Senegal. According to U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, his brother sent ambassadors to both countries asking for assistance. Guinea’s president, Sékou Touré, agreed to prevent Soviet planes from refueling in the capital, Conakry, explaining that he was not going to assist any country in constructing a military base on foreign soil. Likewise, Senegal’s president, Léopold Senghor, appreciated Kennedy’s turn toward Africa and his political and economic support for the recently decolonized nation. He also quickly agreed to refuse to let Soviet planes refuel in his nation’s capital, Dakar. These two West African countries helped the United States strengthen the quarantine around Cuba and prevent further nuclear weapons from arriving.

Today, the nation’s leaders have forgotten the most vital lesson of the crisis, even as we face new crises. Instead of working together with its Latin American neighbors to fight against the shared threat of militarized drug trafficking operations, the United States has insulted Mexico’s leaders and threatened to conduct its own unilateral military operations on Mexican soil. Illegal attacks on alleged drug trafficking gang members in boats off the coast of Venezuela undermine the rule of law both at home and on the international level. Instead of supporting allies in NATO and Ukraine against aggressive Russian territorial expansion, the United States has proposed drastic cuts to defensive military support measures and played fawning host to Vladimir Putin. Instead of continuing to provide desperately needed food and medical aid to African partners, the Trump Administration has dismantled the U.S. foreign aid infrastructure, causing thousands of deaths and exposing the world to the threat of new, unchecked epidemics.

Unilateralism has not been historically effective at confronting major collective international relations challenges. By recalling the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are reminded of how critical allies small and large can be. And yet, these alliances are by no means inevitable; the multilateral sinews that bind peoples and nations need to be cultivated when times are good and bad.

As Robert Kennedy put it in his memoir about the Cuban Missile Crisis, “We cannot be an island even if we wished; nor can we successfully separate ourselves from the rest of the world.” At America and the world’s moment of greatest peril, allies helped the United States prevent nuclear war. President Kennedy did not stand alone, eyeball to eyeball, against Khrushchev. He had the hard-won backing of allies in Latin America, NATO, and West Africa.

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Making A Case For Aid: Less Donor-Curated Visibility, More Redistribution Of Narrative Power

Local communities often work on innovative solutions that remain invisible to major donors.

BY KEVIN MOFOKENG

There is a quiet power struggle unfolding across Africa’s development landscape, waged not through protest or policy, but through funding calls, curated dashboards, and strategy decks written far from the communities they aim to serve. At the centre of this ecosystem is what might be called the Social Impact Mafia: an influential and self-reinforcing network of consultants, NGO insiders, donor advisors, and programme officers.

This elite clique not only decides who receives funding but also shapes the contours of what qualifies as “good,” “innovative,” or “worthy.” The result is a growing disconnect between lived African realities and the narratives that dominate the development space.

This isn’t an abstract concern. Consider the case of birth registration in sub-Saharan Africa.

According to UNICEF, fewer than 51% of children under five are officially registered. In Zimbabwe, the figure fell below half in 2019, especially among rural and home births. Yet much of the funding continues to pour into digitization projects that benefit urban centres and areas already serviced. What remains is a gap between community needs and what donors are willing to fund, because the latter often prioritize tech-forward optics over grounded, context-sensitive work.

This misalignment is not limited to bureaucratic inefficiency, it is a symptom of a system obsessed with performance over substance. Development programmes are increasingly designed for global audiences: media-ready, metric-driven, and brand-compliant. Local knowledge is routinely undervalued unless it can be repackaged to fit donor logic. Even the language of participation has been commodified. “Community-led” has become a label to affix on a brochure, not a commitment to relinquish power.

The social impact mafia does not operate through malice. It functions through selectivity, and its tools are subtle: grant criteria that reward certain storytelling styles, eligibility requirements that demand professional networks inaccessible to grassroots actors, and partnerships that quietly favour those with pre-existing institutional legitimacy. In this world, trust is extended not based on
proximity to the problem, but on proximity to the funding circle. The consequence is the silent marginalization of Africa’s most disruptive, transformative ideas, because they are too radical, too informal, too slow, or too unbranded to fit into slick theory-of-change templates. Some of the most effective civic, gender justice, and economic resilience work is being carried out in informal settlements and rural nodes, but without the glossy visibility required to get a seat at the table.

This is not to suggest that alternatives don’t exist. The Segal Family Foundation, for instance, has adopted a more trust-based approach, prioritizing unrestricted, community-led funding across several African countries. Their model allows grantees to define success on their own terms. In 2020, over 800 organizations signed on to similar principles, calling for less bureaucracy, more listening, and a shift in power from funders to communities. But these remain exceptions. The centre still holds, and the gatekeepers are very much in place.

What’s especially troubling is how performative inclusion has become. Many institutions loudly proclaim their commitment to decolonizing aid, diversifying leadership, and elevating youth voices. But too often, this amounts to symbolic gestures: a panel here, a soundbite there. Young leaders are invited to speak but not to decide. Feminist and queer movements are tokenized, then defunded when they become inconvenient. And criticism from within the sector is tolerated only when it conforms to its own grammar of change.

This performativity is not harmless, it is structurally violent. It displaces accountability, erases dissent, and rewards conformity. More dangerously, it replaces transformation with theatre, projecting the illusion of progress while cementing existing hierarchies. Africa does not need more donor-curated visibility. It needs a redistribution of narrative power.

The recent moves to scale back US foreign assistance, particularly USAID funding, could radically alter this ecosystem. For years, USAID has shaped Africa’s development agenda through large-scale grants that often favour big implementers with the right connections and branding. A pullback could disrupt this status quo, forcing donors to rethink their reliance on elite intermediaries. But it could also deepen inequities: smaller, community-rooted organizations may be left scrambling as big players pivot to chase private capital and corporate partnerships. Whether this shift dismantles the social impact “gatekeepers” or simply reshuffles them depends on how funding is restructured and whether African governments and philanthropists step in to fill the gap.

As new funding flows into Africa, from green bonds to ESG investments, from climate justice to tech-for-good, there is an urgent question we must ask: whose vision of the future is being funded? If the power to define “good” remains confined to elite circles and institutional pipelines, we will only reproduce exclusion with a friendlier face.

It is not enough to rebrand development. What is required is a fundamental shift in who decides, who designs, and who tells the story. Otherwise, the continent’s most brilliant possibilities will remain unfunded, unheard, and unrecognized, not because they failed, but because they refused to perform.

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Book Review: “We The People” — When Constitutional Crisis Meets Narrative Excess

BY DANIEL LAZARE

Are books fit subjects for psychoanalysis? If so, Jill Lepore’s We the People would be first on the couch. Its topic is American constitutional history with a particular emphasis on Article V, the 140-word run-on sentence that says you need the approval of two-thirds of each house of Congress plus three-fourths of the states in order to change so much as a comma. The amending clause is a killer, Lepore notes, one that has led to a constitutional deadlock that grows more dangerous by the week. But, instead of exploring the implications of this fact, all of which are explosive, she pours out an abundance of anecdotes whose purpose, to quote George Orwell, is to fall “upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”

The result is a book that is padded, overlong, and hence far less powerful than it ought to be. This is not to say that Lepore doesn’t do a good job. She does – with certain aspects, that is. She deals with the immovability of Article V by citing Antonin Scalia on the three-fourths half of the rule, the one that now allows as few as 13 states to veto any attempt at constitutional reform. After running the numbers, Scalia’s conclusion was that “something like less than two percent of the population can prevent a constitutional amendment.” The math seems a little off, since the 13 least populous states add up to 4.4 percent of the population, meaning that a majority would be somewhere around 2.2 percent or 2.3. But why quibble? The point is that Article V allows infinitesimal minorities to veto any and all efforts at constitutional reforms sought by the remainder. Hence Lepore’s conclusion: “That is not a constitutional door. That is a constitutional barricade.”

Quite right. Article V is an example of the tyranny of the minority that bottles up the desire for change until it’s ready to explode. As We the People puts it, “It is a rule of American history that when amendment becomes impossible, the risk of insurrection rises.” A constitutional freeze that began early in the 19th century thus contributed directly to the Civil War some 60 years later. The constitutional freeze that began in the early 1970s contributed to Donald Trump’s attempted coup in January 2021.

Instead of a force for stability, an unchangeable Constitution is the opposite. Lepore tosses in a corollary for good measure: “The more difficult it became to amend the Constitution, the more politicized were nominations to the Supreme Court.” This is accurate as well, given how vicious confirmation battles have become. As she notes:

The tit for tat had begun in 1967, when Strom Thurmond had tried to trip up [LBJ nominee] Thurgood Marshall with obscure questions about constitutional history in an attempt to prove that Blacks were racially inferior to whites. Birch Bayh had then defeated the nomination of [Clement] Haynsworth and [G. Harold] Carswell by introducing evidence that they were secretly segregationists. Feminists had defeated [Robert] Bork by claiming he would turn back the clock on women’s rights and overturn Roe. By the time Bush nominated [Clarence] Thomas, sexual harassment was the topic of the day.

And so on until 2018 when Democrats tried to deep-six Brett Kavanaugh by bringing in a mystery witness named Christine Blasey Ford with a tale of sexual assault at a teenage party that was not quite as iron-clad as they wanted us to believe. (Ford was unable to remember key details while a friend named Leland Keyser, who was also present at the party, later said her account didn’t hold up. “I don’t have any confidence in the story,” she told reporters.) But the nomination went through regardless, sending polarization rocketing upwards even more. We the People sums up how the vicious cycle works:

It was because of the insurmountable hurdle of Article V that … that liberals had sought constitutional change through the courts instead of by way of amendment. … The greater their success, the stronger the backlash. The stronger the backlash, the greater the polarization. The greater the polarization, the greater the difficulty of amendment. The greater the difficulty of amendment, the greater the recourse to the courts. And then the wheel turned again.

Lepore explores other aspects of the breakdown. There are the endless wars over interpretation and original intent. The latter concept seems sensible enough. If you want to know more about particular clause or text, then why not explore the thinking of those who formulated it? But the effort leads to a paradox. Participants in the 1787 constitutional convention were so intent on secrecy that they nailed the windows shut and pledged to keep mum about the proceedings for a half a century after. “Whatever venerations might be entertained for the body of men who formed our Constitution,” Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “the sense of that body could never be regarded as the oracular guide in expounding the Constitution.”

So it seems that the founders’ original intent was that we should ignore original intent. But yet another problem looms: we’re drawn to original intent regardless. Lepore tells of a New Deal constitutional lawyer named Jacobus tenBroek who denounced the doctrine as out-and-out fraud:

Any theory which describes the meaning of the Constitution as changeless, which understands that constitutionality is decided by the outcome of a judicial search for the original intent, which makes of a constitutional issue only an historical question, which denies the proper influence of the altering factual world upon the meaning of the document – any theory which does all these things – is an utterly false portrayal of what the Supreme Court actually does.

Instead, tenBroek argued in behalf of a “doctrine of constitutional adaptability” that would allow Americans to interpret the document more flexibly in view of changing historical circumstances. This seems sensible too, since it’s obvious that modern society can’t be forced to conform to an 18th-century constitutional framework. But then tenBroek went and spoiled it all by arguing that flexibility was “the framers’ original intent,” to quote Lepore. The circle of confusion was thus complete. Even if you adhere in original intent, you’re stuck with the problem of which original intent to adhere to, the one that says we can be as flexible as we wish or the one that says we can’t. Americans are like characters in Dante’s Inferno, condemned to argue for all eternity over a doctrine that no one believes in, yet no one can quite let go.

There’s also the theory of implicit rights, which refers to rights that the Constitution does not lay out in black and white, but which nonetheless seem to flow from the document’s overall logic. For conservatives, it’s an article of faith that liberal Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas stretched things to the breaking point when, in a 1965 decision, he claimed to discern a general right of privacy in various “penumbras” and “emanations” arising out of the Bill of Rights. Not surprisingly, Clarence Thomas supposedly put up a sign in his chambers saying, “Please don’t emanate in the penumbras.” But Lepore cites an anti-abortion group called United for Life, which claimed to discern a general right to life that is “implicit in other, more explicitly protected rights.” So we’re back to implicit rights after all. When the other side does it, it’s playing fast and loose with the text. When our side does it, it’s strict construction at its finest.

One could go on – and indeed Lepore does for close to 600 pages. But despite her deep knowledge of the subject and her formidable analytic abilities, she lards the text with so many digressions that the reader winds up lost. There are side excursions into complicated 18th-century devices known as orreries, which were designed to show the planets revolving in their orbits. There are further digressions about Jefferson and his slaves, about native-American efforts to devise constitutions of their own, about Dred Scott and the problem of a constitutional reading that holds that all men are not created equal, and so on.

Lepore paints an extended portrait of a pioneering Black journalist named Ethel Payne, a reporter for the Chicago Defender. We see Payne covering the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, listening to the Brown v. Board of Education hearings, and reporting on congressional efforts to amend the Constitution so as to prevent integration once and for all. The Bandung Conference, which took place in 1955, was especially important because it shows how appalled the ex-colonial world was about US racial policies. But it’s unclear why Payne merits attention and not, say, Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, who complained that Americans “are reminded over and over by some foreign newspapers and spokesmen, that our treatment of various minorities leaves much to be desired.” Acheson was a key supporter of Brown because he thought desegregation would enable America to fare better against the Soviets. It was proof, as the historian Mary Dudziak has argued, that desegregation was as much “a Cold War imperative” as anything else. But why Lepore places a peripheral character like Payne at center stage instead is unclear.

Ultimately, all these digressions, anecdotes, and mini-profiles seem like an avoidance mechanism whose purpose is to steer clear of a constitutional crisis that is too painful to face. We the People is particularly unsatisfying when it finally gets to Trump. This, after all, is the man who lost the popular vote in 2016 and only squeaked into office by virtue of a constitutional quirk; whose presidency sparked a near civil war over alleged Russian influence; who was impeached twice; who ran afoul of Democratic “lawfare” aimed at destroying his business and putting him behind bars for the rest of his life, and who then clawed his back into the presidency in 2024.

Now that Trump is busy trying to put enemies like James B. Comey and Letitia James in jail, it’s a sterling case of backlash and polarization raised to the nth degree. It should have gotten Lepore’s juices flowing because it illustrates all too well how a frozen constitution leads to democratic collapse. Yet her discussion goes flat. Instead of confronting the problem head-on, we get still more digressions – into Jefferson’s use of child labor, into an early-19th-century French loom that used punch cards to weave new patterns, into AI, the climate crisis, and even William F. Buckley Jr. The prose is so cloying as to make even Oprah Winfrey’s toes curl:

No constitution can be kept forever, like a butterfly under glass, tacked down with pins … To constitute is to become or establish; to amend is to mend, correct, repair, and improve. Americans might learn against to amend, or else they could invent a new instrument to guarantee liberty, promote equality, nurture families, knit communities, thwart tyranny, and avert the destruction of a habitable earth. Constitutions began with stones and seashells, with old books and oak trees, with sheepskin and goose feathers. From the burning, scorched earth, new ideas might arise once more, seedlings, sprouting, tendrils wending to the sun.

Yuck. Calling for a new instrument of governance means calling for revolution. Lepore takes refuge in excess verbiage because she’s afraid to confront where all this is going. Paging Dr. Freud…

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The Tangled Legacy Of The Man Who Led Africa’s Liberation

BY JENNIFER SZALAI

In 1951, when Kwame Nkrumah arrived on American shores for a whirlwind visit to the United States, only a few months had passed since he had won a landslide election from a Gold Coast prison cell; in subsequent years, he would secure the colony’s independence from British rule, becoming the first prime minister of Ghana, the country formed in its place, in 1957.

While he was in New York, Nkrumah sat down for a flurry of press interviews. In Washington, he was feted with a State Department luncheon. The mayor of Philadelphia presented him with the keys to the city — an especially stark sign of how much had changed for Nkrumah, who had previously spent a decade in the United States, earning four degrees (in sociology, theology, education and philosophy). In the early 1940s, as an impecunious graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, he was harassed by Philadelphia’s police officers for sleeping overnight in the train station.

“Nkrumah and his delegation were given prominent coverage in almost all of America’s Black newspapers, which hailed him effusively,” Howard W. French writes in “The Second Emancipation.” The outpouring, French suggests, was inversely proportionate to the demeaning treatment African Americans faced on a daily basis. His capacious book traces the connections between the American civil rights movement and global pan-Africanism, with Nkrumah at the center.

As the title suggests, decolonization was a second emancipation, ending the forced labor and subjugation imposed by the European powers on their colonies. The 1950s and 1960s saw momentous transformations taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1960 alone, 17 countries in Africa obtained their independence. That year, James Baldwin reported on a sit-in in Florida by young African Americans. These students “were born at the very moment at which Europe’s domination of Africa was ending,” Baldwin wrote in an article for Mademoiselle. Decolonization expanded the sense of possibility. Baldwin still remembered Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935; the touchstone for the new generation was “the establishment of the Republic of Ghana.”

Nkrumah, for his part, comes across as a fascinating and enigmatic figure. He was ostensibly born in 1909, the only child of his mother, though details of his early life are fuzzy. Nkrumah’s own autobiography was the kind of “polished and streamlined” account that’s typical of a political memoir. It was published in 1957, the same year that the Gold Coast became Ghana, and was handed out at the independence ceremony, presenting his ascent as a matter of destiny.

That kind of messianic thinking would become ever more pronounced as the years wore on. French chronicles how, during his nine-year rule, Nkrumah grew increasingly authoritarian, jailing political opponents, proclaiming a one-party system and giving himself the title of “president for life.” At the same time, he was drawn to the world outside of Ghana, promoting pan-Africanism — a sense of unity and purpose on the continent and among the African diaspora — to the inspiration of some and the consternation of others.

“Critics and foes called his pursuit of pan-Africanism an exorbitant distraction,” French writes, showing how Nkrumah’s lofty transnationalism could seem disconnected from the internal divisions and material problems faced by his own nation. Ghana, a dominant cocoa-producing country, was vulnerable to fickle cocoa prices, and so Nkrumah became fixated on the prospect of rapid industrialization. He was determined to build a hydroelectric dam, refusing to believe skeptical economists who warned that such a project would allow foreign companies to profit at Ghana’s expense.

French, a professor of journalism at Columbia and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, covers a lot of ground in a book that merges biography with panorama. His previous book, “Born in Blackness,” showed how the making of the modern world wasn’t just a story about Europe; it was also about Africa. “The Second Emancipation” is a sequel, bringing that approach into the postwar era. Nkrumah, like other leaders of Africa’s newly independent states, struggled to stay neutral amid the Cold War. “We face neither East nor West,” Nkrumah once said. “We face forward.”

Nkrumah may not have been interested in the Cold War, but the Cold War was most definitely interested in him. An avowed socialist, he was continually dogged by suspicions that he was a “closet communist” (he was not, French says). He kept investing in education, but he also became paranoid and withdrawn. “The regime had begun to commit autophagy, cannibalizing itself,” French writes. A vicious circle proceeded apace: Dictatorial rule fueled assassination attempts, which deepened dictatorial rule. While traveling to Vietnam in 1966, Nkrumah was deposed in a coup, with Washington providing, “at a minimum, quiet encouragement.”

“The Second Emancipation” ably treads the line on Nkrumah’s complicated legacy. French keeps reminding the reader of the larger context, pointing out how European colonies were laboratories not for good governance but for authoritarianism. He also emphasizes the central role of time. Nkrumah noted that European powers had centuries to work through their contradictions: “What other countries have taken 300 years or more to achieve, a once dependent territory must try to accomplish in a generation if it is to survive.”

It was this shared sense of urgency that made pan-Africanism such a potent force, even if French concludes that a “can-do vision” must never lose sight of the more humble, painstaking work necessary for truly sustainable development. He quotes Julius Nyerere, the founding leader of Tanzania, who recalled Nkrumah’s impatience as double-edged — a source of tremendous energy as well as inevitable frustration: “My differences with Kwame were that Kwame thought there was somehow a shortcut, and I was saying that there was no shortcut. This is what we have inherited, and we will have to proceed within the limitations that that inheritance has imposed on us.”

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What Abraham Lincoln Understood About The Founders

BY JEFF SHESOL

Among the truths still held, by many Americans, to be self-evident, “all men are created equal” is the most fundamental. The current assault on that belief — waged by all three branches of government — is brazen and cruel, but not without precedent. Much of American history has been a battle over the ways we give meaning and the force of law to the idea of equality.

That struggle — to determine and fulfill, and perhaps to exceed, the founders’ intentions — is the focus of a new book by the legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar. “Born Equal” is the second volume in his three-part constitutional history of the United States.

The first, “The Words That Made Us,” opened in 1760 with the accession of King George III. This new installment picks up the action in 1840, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London and are told, Amar observes, to “sit and listen but not speak or vote.” The story moves through the next 80 years, from Stanton and Mott’s assertion of women’s rights at Seneca Falls to Dred Scott, the Civil War and the four constitutional amendments that extended full and equal citizenship to Black Americans and women. It is an energetic, if roundabout, tour.

Amar, who teaches law at Yale and publishes widely, has always been at his best in explaining constitutional language and untangling constitutional arguments. “Born Equal” is mainly a work of narrative history, but its protagonists are America’s founding texts: As the book makes clear, the Civil War was at its core “a clash between two sharply opposed visions” of the national charter.

Amar’s treatment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, among other episodes, showcases his expertise. Rather than simply recount the back and forth, he uses it as a prompt to consider 10 interpretations of “created equal” — from the narrowest, which holds that the phrase was just misleading rhetoric, to the most expansive, that government has a duty to provide “a fair chance” to all, as Lincoln later put it. Amar is similarly effective in showing how the 1848 Seneca Falls declaration responded to the Declaration of Independence.

“Born Equal” is learned and long but never dry; it is, if anything, strenuously chatty. The historical set pieces have punch, and Amar imbues figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe with humanity and immediacy.

Yet there is a feeling throughout of the lecturer playing to the back of the hall. The book is awash in asides, anachronisms (the word “meme” among the most frequent) and first names: The Seneca Falls statement of principles is “Elizabeth’s Declaration”; the Emancipation Proclamation is “Abe’s act.” It is also digressive to a degree that the first volume, an even longer book, was not. The complexities of 19th-century politics and, it appears, the capaciousness of Amar’s interests lead him afield from his central story line.

Still, he is unswerving — and unblushing — in his larger aim: “to set judges and other legal officials straight about what the Constitution really means.” This of course is a tall order, whether the principle at issue is free speech or popular sovereignty or, as it is here, equality — an ideal whose meaning would seem to be as fluid and contested as any in the founding documents.

Amar has long led the charge of the so-called liberal originalists, who, like the far more prominent originalists on the right, believe the Constitution’s meaning is almost always apparent in the text or in contemporary sources, such as James Madison’s “Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.” The two sides differ in a crucial respect: While conservatives maintain that 18th-century intentions align, invariably, with the agenda of the 21st-century G.O.P., Amar contends that they often (not always) point toward progressive results.

“Born Equal” is his latest — and perhaps most assertive — effort to stake a claim on original intent. Antebellum America, Amar argues, was “unabashedly originalist,” deeply reverential toward its “founding men and founding texts.”

He builds his case with “a blizzard of data points,” among them that the election of William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848 fit an “originalist pattern” because both men served as generals, as Washington had; that countless sons and towns and territories were named after founding fathers; that James Monroe “managed to die on July 4, 1831,” sanctifying Independence Day just as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had done in 1826; and that America’s “first two postage stamps,” he writes, “bore the likenesses of Washington and Franklin.”

Few readers would question that the founders held the nation in thrall, even during a civil war over what those founders had wrought. Not only did North and South “pray to the same God,” as Lincoln memorably put it, but they invoked the same heroes. In over-stressing this point, Amar refashions a story of constitutional upheaval as a parable of consistency, one in which “politicians whose originalist claims were more faithful” — politicians like Lincoln — ultimately prevail. This reinforces the allure and false promise of originalism: the idea that the text, if you squint hard enough, reveals the answer to almost everything.

Three decades ago, in “The Bill of Rights,” a revisionist meditation on those first 10 amendments, Amar warned against a “curiously selective ancestor worship” that elevates the revolutionary era above the Second Founding — the “new birth of freedom” that reshaped the nation in the 1860s and ’70s. He would have done well here to heed his own warning.

To call Lincoln “his generation’s best originalist” sells short the radicalism of his achievement — and the distance he and his battle-weary nation had traveled from its beginning. What Lincoln understood was that the idea of equality, to be worth its cost in blood, demanded more than obeisance to words on parchment. It required reconception. At Gettysburg, he called this our “unfinished work.” So it remains.

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BOOK REVIEW: How To Do A Midlife Self Review That Actually Works

In Live to 100 and Love It!: An Easy Road Map to Longevity Stacey Colino and the editors of Prevention share a science-backed, six-step routine for redefining your identity after 60.

BY STACEY COLINO

W hen you live for several decades viewing yourself a certain way—as a colleague, as a parent, as a certain type of person—it’s understandable that self-perceptions become solidified. Consciously or not, we all have beliefs about who we are that are based on our behaviors, abilities, feelings, and personality characteristics as well as how others see us and how they respond to us. This is what psychologists call “self-concept”—a reflection of how you see yourself as a person— and it has a powerful effect on the way you act, the choices you make, the attitudes you have, and how you move through life. If you’ve always been known as a go-getter or, conversely, a low-key person, you probably assume you’ll always be that way.

And then you hit middle age, and maybe you start to feel not quite like yourself. One reason may be that your reactions, preferences, needs, values, and expectations have shifted over time, but your self-concept hasn’t kept up. “We tend to think of ourselves as static, but we do change,” says Mark Leary, Ph.D., professor emeritus in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and author of The Curse of the Self.

Update Your Self Concept

Thinking of ourselves as being one way when we have in fact changed can leave us feeling confused, out of sorts, stuck, or full of self-doubt, says Leary. Research has found that this is a common phenomenon at a certain point in life: Self-concept clarity—the extent to which someone has a clear understanding of their self and identity—increases each decade until the 60s, then begins to decline; after that, “people become less sure of their identity,” the study authors noted, perhaps partly because of shifts in their work, family, and community roles at this life stage. Rediscovering a sense of self has been rated as one of the most challenging aspects of midlife for women, according to a study involving 81 women over 23 years.

Unfortunately, harboring outdated ideas about yourself can end up holding you back from taking smart risks and embracing new challenges when doing so might lead you to feel more fulfilled. “If we’re looking at ourselves through an old lens of who we are, we take those outdated views into our future and make decisions based on that,” says Michele Patterson Ford, Ph.D., a psychologist in private practice and a senior lecturer at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, updating your self-concept to reflect who and how you are now can help you pursue experiences and activities that feel satisfying and meaningful and skip or minimize those that may not suit you anymore. After doing some self-reflection, you might realize that you’ve outgrown the intense fear of public speaking you used to have and might actually enjoy giving the professional talks you’ve been invited to present. Or maybe you’ll realize that you’ve had enough of the corporate grind and what you really want to do is pursue your artistic talent. And when you have a stronger, clearer sense of who you are now, you’re likely to feel more comfortable in your own skin, maybe even happier, which is valuable in its own right. Ultimately, the goal is to make choices and changes that are in your current best interest, rather than in the best interest of you 10 or 20 years ago. So how can you figure out if you’re working with a self-concept that reflects who you are now? You dig in and do an inventory.

6-Step Self Review

Step 1: Sit down and, in writing, take stock of your current strengths, weaknesses, values, and preferences, suggests Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D., professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ask yourself questions like these:What are 5–10 things I am good at? These could be anything from talents to work skills to hobbies to interpersonal qualities, etc.

What are 5–10 things I struggle with? These could be daily challenges you have, things you avoid, or where you have trouble with motivation, etc.

What are 5–10 values I closely hold?These might be hard work or kindness.

What are 5–10 things I love? These can be as wide-ranging as hanging out with your dog to working in your business.

Step 2 Ask people who know you well if you’ve got the right idea. Do they think you embody these talents, values, and passions (and struggles) as much as you believe you do?

Step 3 Reflect on their answers. If everything is aligned, move on to step 4. If the answer is no, take a look at how you spend your time so you can make a concerted effort to engage in more activities that reflect the qualities and things you value. Living in a way that aligns with what you value about yourself can help solidify your self-concept, says Ford.

Step 4 Think about what was important to you 10, 20, or 30 years ago and write a letter to your younger self sharing what you’ve learned about yourself over time, how you’ve changed, and what really matters to you now.

Step 5 Stay open-minded. You might have lost some qualities you care about over time. Updating your self-concept is as much about consciously letting go of notions that no longer suit you as it is reclaiming aspects of yourself that you value.

Step 6 Rethink the terms you use or yourself. Tune in to the ways you label or describe yourself— like calling yourself an introvert or an extrovert or seeing yourself as uncreative—and assess whether these terms accurately describe your current behaviors.

Now that you have a better understanding of who you are today, ask yourself the following questions to create a path to the future:What kinds of activities make you feel fulfilled? What do you truly enjoy doing?

What have you always wanted to do or try but haven’t? Can you do it now?

Is your social circle supportive and gratifying? If not, how can you expand it?

When you imagine the future, what do you want your life to look like in five years? Ten years? Fifteen years?

What do you value most in life, and are you living in a way that’s true to those values? If not, what can you do to change that?

What nonmaterial things would you like to have more of in your life?

How would you like people to remember you when you’re gone?

If today were your last day on earth, how would you spend it?

Now think about how you can set yourself up to bring more of these valuable experiences into your life. Assess this on a practical level, as well as on financial, psychological, and emotional levels. Also, think of older people you know who have these elements in their lives. Consider seeking their advice for steps you could take to cultivate them in yours.

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What We Can Know By Ian McEwan Review – The Limits Of Liberalism

BY KEVIN PORTER

The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just McEwan’s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes – to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England’s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.

These thoughts were provoked by a brief passage in McEwan’s future-set new novel that describes the “Inundation” of Britain after a Russian warhead goes off accidentally in the middle of the Atlantic, causing a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, wipes out everything but a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks. In these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the fate of that other major chunk of the British Isles is not mentioned. Presumably Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. But from McEwan’s future history, you’d never know it. I began to think of What We Can Know as another of McEwan’s deeply English stories. It has, I thought, the familiar partialities of vision. Has Brexit, endlessly backstopped by those pesky six counties, taught English liberals nothing?

But I don’t mean to make fun. Insularity, in both senses of the word, is one of McEwan’s themes in What We Can Know. The book is composed of two islands of prose, linked only by the tenuous bridge of a brief note at the end. And it is about being islanded, in time, in space, in life.

The novel is set a century hence, in 2119. Part one is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, who teaches literature at the University of the South Downs, an institution largely focused on science and maths, located on a 38-mile-wide island in the “sleepy ahistorical” republican archipelago that is all that remains of the UK. (To say who narrates part two would constitute a spoiler.) The world is post-catastrophe. The 21st century has unfolded as we all fear it will. The US is now run by rival “warlords”; Nigeria is the hegemonic power. But this is all offstage stuff. As the novel begins, Tom catches various boats to the Bodleian Library, now occupying a Snowdonian peak and accessible by “water-and-gravity-powered funicular”. Here, he trawls the archive of Francis Blundy, a poet of our own time, and allegedly the equal of Seamus Heaney (whose papers at the National Library of Ireland must now be soggy beyond use).

Superficially a quiet, scholarly sort – his opening pages stress how “tranquil” and “smooth” his life is – Tom, like a true scholar, burns within. He is in search of a lost poem, the improbably named A Corona for Vivien, which Blundy wrote for his wife Vivien’s 50th birthday in 2014. Read aloud once at Vivien’s birthday dinner, the sole copy, on vellum, which scholars know of only from contemporary accounts of the dinner, vanished into a credulity-stretching afterlife as the great lost poem of the climate crisis. Alone on the island of his obsession, Tom builds a portrait of the missing masterpiece, and alongside it, a portrait of the early 21st century.

It’s a nostalgic portrait, and Tom’s obsessive nostalgia for our violent and chaotic historical moment is the canniest thing about What We Can Know. Certainly, the plot – turning as it does on the fate of Blundy’s vellum manuscript and a series of shock disclosures about various characters – is absurdly gripping and finally unpersuasive in that familiar McEwan way (you turn the pages hungrily, and then at the end you think: Hang on). “To have been alive then,” Tom writes unironically, “in those resourceful raucous times.” Tom’s nostalgia is not shared by his present-minded students, who see us as having been “ignorant, squalid and destructive louts”.

Beneath his opinionated frankness, we come to suspect, Tom is really a deeply elusive narrator. It is Tom, perhaps, and not his creator, who has the English liberal’s partiality of vision. Crusoed on his regressive scholarly island, he has little time for the needy humanity of the people around him. He views his colleague and sometime lover Rose, for instance, increasingly as a means to an end. Can his nostalgia, or indeed his liberalism, be trusted? Will they ever be enough, now or in the future? What We Can Know gradually reveals itself as an anatomy of, precisely, liberal partiality – of the insularity of a liberalism busily nostalgic for all the wrong things.

At one point, Rose argues that, during the years 2015 to 2030, there was “a crisis of realism in fiction” brought about by the scale of climate disaster: “New forms were needed to frame the physical and moral consequences of a global catastrophe.” We are meant, I think, to view Rose’s theory with some irony. But we are surely also meant to see What We Can Know in Rose’s terms, as an attempt to find a new form in which to speak about what McEwan’s characters, echoing Amitav Ghosh, call “the derangement”. Thus, this is a science fiction novel (McEwan’s second proper one, after Machines Like Me) that is also a novel entirely about our mundane present, with its “metaphysical gloom” about the future. The science fiction scenario, the secret histories eventually disclosed: these are fun, and handled with great brio, but they’re not exactly original. The book’s value lies in what it is prepared to omit – nothing new, this, but a classically realist virtue. What it omits, and makes us work out for ourselves: the “moral consequences of a global catastrophe”. Which we can know only, perhaps, by inference or by imagining.

Liberalism itself, in the early 21st century, feels increasingly archipelagic – confined to the island peaks of a former upland. We may see McEwan, the liberal critic of liberalism, as one of those peaks. Après lui, le déluge?

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Friday Essay: The Dangers Of Centrism In A Time Of Crisis

BY RICHARD DENNISS

ADJUNCT PROFESSOR, CRAWFORD

SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY, 

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

In the fight against slavery, abolitionists eventually prevailed over slave owners. The long fight was not won in the sensible centre, but by “radical, democratic” absolutists who risked their lives in the fight to save the lives of others. It scares me to think how the ABC, or indeed most of the world’s media, would report on such a debate today.

Can you imagine the economic modelling on the jobs that would be lost in the slave-using industries? Or the endless discussion of the impact on the price of clothes if slaves didn’t pick cotton?

And can you imagine the modern debate about the best way to compensate hard-working slave owners whose business model was based on long-accepted rules allowing whipping and branding?

Slavery persists today, and England (the major global slave trader of the 1800s) paid out the equivalent of over £17 billion in compensation to slave owners in 1837, but it’s important to remember that change was driven by abolitionists, not centrists.

The incrementalism on the path to abolition was a consequence of sustained pressure against change, but the incrementalism was never the goal. Unsurprisingly, few mock the extremism of those who fought to end slavery in the US and UK, and few argue abolitionists would have achieved more if they had asked for less.

Leaders such as António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the UN, have long been arguing for immediate and decisive action on climate both for existential and moral reasons. He is not interested in a middle ground. The climate science says time is crucial. For those determined to avoid dangerous climate change the goal isn’t to decarbonise the economy, but to decarbonise it before scientific thresholds are reached.

It is physics that says we will melt the ice caps, raise sea levels radically and warm waters so much that we don’t just kill the Great Barrier Reef, but we will kill whole food systems in our oceans and on our farmlands. You either accept the physics or you don’t but committing to the goal of decarbonising and not committing to the physics-imposed deadlines is like committing to stopping smoking after you have your second heart attack.

The science says we do need to rush. It is now over 30 years since the Australian government first accepted that climate change was real, was primarily caused by fossil fuels, and was an enormous risk to Australia, but centrists like Albanese are still telling us that it’s not yet time to stop building new gas or coal mines.

Saying those who accept climate science are extreme when they call for more ambitious and urgent action is like criticising a drowning man for being impatient about the delay in launching a rescue boat. Timing is critical for some problems and solving them too late isn’t a solution at all.

Evidence matters

Scientific evidence simply doesn’t recognise political pragmatism or positioning, but while many political centrists express support for evidence-based policy, in reality when the evidence and politics clash centrists usually support the politics, often on the basis that something is better than nothing or that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

António Guterres is clearly an extremist by Australian standards when he says,

We are hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open […] It’s time to wake up and step up […] leave oil, coal and gas in the ground where they belong.

But does anyone think he would change his comments if he knew that Labor had more ambitious household battery policies than the Coalition?

Scientific evidence, cost-benefit analyses, opinion polling and principled leadership all have a role to play in driving reforms.

But while each of these ingredients can play an important role in shaping policy, the ultimate shape of policy, and the public’s reaction to it, will be determined by the judgement and political skill of those in power and their ability to align their priorities with those of the community they wish to serve.

In Australia, centrism means it’s okay to ignore evidence if the other side ignores it too.

Centrism and a captured media

According to some in the legacy Australian media, The Australia Institute is a “left-wing think tank” (we prefer “progressive”) with vested interests and anti-gas views.

According to that same media, the CEOs of foreign-owned companies are simply well-respected captains of industry, business leaders and job creators whose main goal is to grow the Australian economy and pay taxes that support Australian schools and hospitals.

While I personally don’t mind if the media calls me left-wing (I certainly think inequality and climate change are bad, and I certainly think publicly run health and education systems are better than privatised ones) I am confused why some in the media feel obliged to describe me as an “activist” just because I am an economist opposed to public subsidies for foreign-owned companies selling a polluting product.

I’m also confused why they introduce the proponents of those mines and gas wells – paid representatives of companies that receive public funding (sometimes paying zero tax) – as neutral experts. Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the Australian media.

Of course, the legacy media’s difficulty in navigating Australia’s rapidly changing political landscape goes much deeper than their struggles with who to talk to and how to describe them.

For decades the legacy media has earnestly reported on what the government of the day, and the opposition of the day, thought about the issues that the government or opposition had decided were important. But now that more people vote for crossbenchers than the Coalition, how should the legacy media decide what issues are politically important?

Consider the following: if most Australians think gambling advertising is a big problem, but neither party wants to talk about it, is the lack of response from the government and the opposition proof that gambling is not a story or proof that both major parties are at odds with the vast majority of voters?

Most Australian journalists and their editors follow the agenda set by politicians. This dynamic helps explain why the major political parties’ vote share and the circulation of newspapers are both in steady decline.

While it is the role of the government and opposition to debate their respective parliamentary agendas, it is the role of a well functioning media not only to cover the content of those debates, but also to critique where necessary that debate.

You might think the fact that neither major party wants to unpack AUKUS or how a country that has tripled gas exports in the last ten years could possibly have a shortage of gas should be a big story. Instead, most of the legacy media interpret the refusal of senior politicians to talk about important issues as proof that they are simply not a story.

The ABC is still using an old map which means that while only 318,000 people subscribe to The Australian, The Australian’s editors know that their front pages can set the agenda for the ABC and other outlets.

Likewise, while only 40,000 of Australia’s 15 million voters watch Sky News each night, its producers know their job is to shift the boundaries of public debate which is much easier than shifting the minds of all those participating in it.

This past election showed that, more than ever before, legacy media holds little sway with the voting public, but they still play a major role in deciding which voices and which ideas are sensible and which are extreme.

Bipartisan silence on an issue may be proof that current policy settings are located comfortably in the sensible centre, based on solid evidence and with broad community support. Australia’s continued reliance on 240v electricity, driving on the left side of the road and our ban on privately owned assault rifles would all fit that bill.

But bipartisan refusal to question whether subsidies for private schools have improved Australia’s education system or whether fossil fuel subsidies deliver good value for Australian taxpayers more likely reflect the desire of both major parties to conceal the strength of their support for powerful groups.

And media silence on issues the major parties choose to ignore only further entrenches voter disaffection with the political and commentator class.

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