By Ralph Keyes

The current discussion surrounding Kindles and other e-book readers brought this to mind. So many assessments I read and hear about these products compare them to “real” books, usually unfavorably. Their resolution is not as good. Their graphics are anemic. You don’t know what page you’re on. Etc. The e-book’s admitted edge in compactness isn’t enough for a real book lover. For them, nothing will replace printed books. They’re irreplaceable; a superb vehicle for delivering text. Instead of asking whether printed books will disappear, we might better ask, “How will writing reach readers in the future?” Conventional books will certainly be one vehicle. E-books will be another. But their form will evolve into something quite different than books-on-a-screen.

Recall how automobiles evolved. Early versions looked like buckboard wagons with engines attached. It was decades before cars began to resemble a new product altogether. Similarly, when it was first introduced at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, television was viewed as an extension of radio (it was even called “illustrated radio”). Early news broadcasters read copy before cameras, looking down at the paper in their hands, as if they were still in a radio studio. It took a couple of decades for television to become a medium all its own.

The same thing will happen with e-books. Today they look like conventional books on a screen. In time, just like cars and television, e-books will find their own form. Their length will vary more than conventional ones; they’ll be shorter on average, with more varied formats, more flexibility, more fluidity, and a wider range of prices. Short stories and novellas are better suited to the e-book format than novels. Articles and essays work better on their small screens than full-scale nonfiction books. E-books might be updated on a regular basis, and perhaps incorporate reader feedback, or author-reader dialogue. The possibilities are infinite, and intriguing.

By Mary Catherine BatesonPresident Obama’s comments on abortion and his record in Illinois suggest a likely course on the death penalty: reduction and better regulation rather than abolition. This seems to be his style – reasoned and moderate reform. When it was found that there had been a number of mistaken convictions in Illinois, he pushed through a bill providing for the videotaping of interrogations leading to confessions in capital crimes, and he is clearly aware that convictions and penalties of all kinds weigh more severely on minorities. However, even though he acknowledges that it does not deter crime, he apparently approves the death penalty for particularly heinous cases, because of the strong feelings involved.

The concept of “shock and awe” came to the attention of the American public at the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, but it is actually a military doctrine based on the immediate use of overwhelming force that has been part of military thinking since 1996, and has arguably affected police procedures as well. “Don’t pull your punches,” we say, “Hit ‘em hard and fast.” In the lead up to the Iraq war, this doctrine meant abandoning negotiation prematurely. It tends to increase collateral casualties, at least in the short term, and in the streets it means shooting at any sign of armed resistance. The Obama administration, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has been working to restore the national commitment to international treaties and the rule of law, but it has not yet renounced Bush’s claim of the right to a preemptive nuclear first strike. We tend to think that the military know their own business best, but it is worth considering whether military and foreign policy have an effect on domestic behavior, and vice versa.

http://ilfpost.org/?p=284 By Linc Bloomfield The crowded conference room fell silent as the first panelist was introduced. It was the beginning of a daylong program of seminars followed by a reception and gala dinner, and if Central Casting had been asked to send over someone who epitomized a senior statesman, this was the man for them — tall, handsome, silver hair, in short the picture of mature gravitas. One of my daughters confessed later that until he spoke she expected this elegant older gent to sound stuffy, egotistical, and highly implausible as a partner for the sometimes lighthearted colleague and friend he was in Cambridge to honor.

But when he did open his mouth it was apparent to all that they were in the presence of a lively mind and sparkling wit to go with it (he started by saying “I thought of discussing Linc’s philosophy of life , but decided it was much too early in the morning for metaphysics so I propose to make my remarks in the form of a letter to the editors of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations”). What followed made it crystal clear that Harlan Cleveland was not only the frequenter of lofty places, but someone cherished at all levels for his humanity, his wit, and his soaring imagination. He died one year ago, and this seems a good occasion for some recollections of this larger-than-life figure of 20th century America..

The event marked my own retirement from teaching, which the Massachusetts Institute of technology had decided to make part of the ceremonial inauguration of its new president, thus enabling the political science department to spring for a day of dazzling events thenceforth labeled by my wife as my beatification. But It was only one of the many moments, professional and other, I was privileged to share with this superb human being over the span of forty-five years.

First a brief reminder of his extraordinary career. With a resume matched only by my classmate Elliot Richardson (who was a fellow-panelist on that MIT morning), Harlan was a kind of boy wonder. Three years after he graduated from Princeton, World War II broke out (for America, that is, since the Brits had already been staggering under its burden for two years) and he was rejected by the army on medical grounds. What he wound up doing, still in his late twenties, was rising to top spots in managing the post-war reconsruction of Italy and China. At a still tender age he became dean of the Maxwell School of Public Service at Syracuse University, followed by years of honing his own unique writing style as an editor and publisher of the lively and brash “Reporter” Magazine

Harlan’s public life took off big-time with the Kennedy administration, in which he served as assistant secretary of state for UN affairs, building a unique relationship with former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson who was US ambassador to the UN. Both were involved in helping to avoid World War III during the Cuban missile crisis. He went on to represent the United States first in France and then in Brussels as ambassador to NATO (first France and then Brussels because French President Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of the military side of NATO – a very French pique that persisted for 40 years until reversed in 2009)

Harlan and Lois, his indispensable “chum” and reality-checker as well as an accomplished classical pianist, packed their bags once more and headed for Honolulu and the presidency of the University of Hawaii, which he led through five turbulent and contentious years (not unique to Hawaii, since even the presumably nerdish MIT students engaged in some riotous behavior during that period).

When Harlan returned to the mainland he lost no time becoming director of international programs at the Aspen Institute, as well as heading the pioneering federal commission exploring the topic of climate modification. Before any serious moss could grow on his back he relocated to Minneapolis to become the founding head of the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Politics at the University of Minnesota. In his last years he served as the imaginative and proactive president of the World Academy of Art and science, and a valued contributor to this International Leadership Forum of the Western Behavioral Science Institute, in whose pioneering work in distant e-conferencing he had played a part.

* * * *

I had the pleasure of collaborating with Harlan Cleveland on many of his multifarious ventures and activities, and never met a more generous colleague and partner. A few examples are worth mentioning. In 1961 after I left the State Department to go to MIT, we had never met but Harlan invited me to become a consultant to his bureau in the State Department. I got involved in helping draft the proposed Outer Space Treaty, of which my strongest memory is a bizarre squabble with the U.S. Air Force which, perhaps not surprisingly, wanted the limits of outer space to be defined as low as possible over the Soviet Union and as high as possible over the United States – a version of celestial mechanics which would have intrigued Kepler, Galileo and their successors, with the possible exception of Captain Kirk of the starship Enterprise.. .

I had a chance to reciprocate during my later tour with the National Security Council. I was working on a speech for President Carter to deliver at the United Nations. and invited Harlan to come in and help me. I have to say that it was over the objections, of some of my bureaucratic colleagues who felt he was excessively imaginative and therefore unsound, which of course was the very quality that inspired Harlan to look over the horizon and see things the rest of us could not see..

At one point the University of Minnesota created the Harold Stassen Chair of World Peace, which was kindly offered me. I was not in a position to accept, and Harlan suggested that I make it not a lifetime but two weeks, during which we worked together on a paper on nuclear arms control subsequently published by the University. Maybe it was the brain-paralyzing Minnesota cold or maybe it was partnering with a guy who encouraged maximum intellectual freedom. But we somehow decided that it would be a nifty wake-up call to laggard governments to stage a demonstration nuclear explosion under the supervision of the UN in an unpopulated area. I was later told that after our nifty idea was discovered by the State Department my name was hastily withdrawn from a list of proposed delegates to the next UN Non-Proliferation Review Conference.

One of Harlan’s major projects was an all-points study of what he called international governance. The first phase involved the preparation and publication of a number of books, which did not go all that well because of Harlan’s loyalty to a non-performing staffer. But the second phase involved meetings of an international group in various corners of the world such as Barcelona, Paris, and points east, west, north and south. It was a very Harlanesque seedbed of ideas, both sensible and off the wall, that were brewing in various quarters of the globe for improved international and multinational institutions. Somewhere in the course of that project Harlan and I collaborated on what we called a citizens’ guide to the nuclear problem, which was published by the MIT press. There were many other collaborations for the most part proposed (and financed) by the amazingly entreprenbeurial Harlan, which I thoroughly enjoyed and profited from in my own career.

It is obvious that Harlan held many posts where his entrepreneurial and managerial skills flourished. But the essence of the man is found rather in some of his governing ideas and concepts. He felt a deep bond with humanity and a perhaps excessive trust in the innate goodness and capacity of others, some of whom failed him. But a quality he jokingly accused me of ” unwarranted optimism” was his signature virtue.

A major contribution was his vision of the meaning and implications of the Information Age, developed before others saw it clearly. This profoundly affected his thinking across the board. Perhaps his greatest contribution was linking that insight to the issue of leadership on which he wrote and lectured extensively. Harlan became convinced long before others that the very definition of leadership required revision if modern institutions were to survive. He turned his fertile mind to imagining what effect global “informatization” would have on traditional modes of organization and hierarchy, expanding that idea in his books and projects with titles like “Nobody in Charge”, “The Knowledge Executive”, “The Twilight of Hierarchy”, and “Reflective Leadership”, all denoting the powerful idea of horizontal networking that was ahead of its time but eventually became the conventional wisdom.

I will end with a typical if surreal example of the way Harlan Cleveland and I took in, so to speak, each other’s professional washing.The phrase “coalition of the willing” was gaining considerable currency in the 1990’s with the UN-sponsored coalition formed during the Gulf War of 1990-91. But it acquired considerable negatives as employed by the second Bush to mask the close-to-unilateral nature of its attack on Iraq. When it still made sense if used sensibly, it turned out that Harlan and I each thought the other had coined the phrase: He told Bartlett’s that I had come up with the general idea in a New York Times OpEd piece in the 1970’s, whereas I told a congressional subcommittee that he had. I explained the whole thing in an OpEd piece in the Baltimore Sun a couple years ago which I’d be glad to e-mail to anyone who’s really interested in an obscure etymological debate.

Harlan Cleveland was one of a kind - a thinker ahead of its time and innovator in both political thought and its translation into action through the magic of his rhetoric. He also had a marvelous sense that life, however serious, should also be fun. He is sorely missed.

By Mary Catherine Bateson. Following last year’s elections, debates about same-sex marriage continue in a number of states that have legislation pending. The possibility of gay marriage has the potential to strengthen, rather than weakening, the social fabric. Marriage involves both rights and responsibilities and it may be that the demands by the gay community for the right to marry will lead to a new consideration of the responsibilities involved for couples of all kinds.

We are endlessly exposed to statistics based on head counts, as if every individual lived and made choices in isolation. But if individuals are metaphorically the atoms of society, they are organized into molecules of varying size and stability, and it is the molecular structure that determines the properties of the society at large. It is not informative simply to define water as consisting of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen: water, whose properties make life possible, consists of the elements combined in molecules. We call the different groupings of persons that constitute society by different names: political parties, clubs, corporations, religious denominations, ethnic associations, civil society . . . and, of course, nuclear families and extended kinship groups. The bonds that connect individuals in each vary but it is the multiplicity of these connections that gives society its resilience. Without them, individuals, especially women and children, are often defined as vulnerable, and men as potentially disruptive. During the colonial era, many communities required that unattached individuals become members of households, often working for room and board.

Human beings are social animals. For all the romance about bachelorhood, men in particular seem to be healthier and happier when married. The relationship we call marriage has as one of its functions the raising of children, which many same-sex couples are already doing, but its greater and more enduring function is that of providing mutual care and happiness. In our society, marriage is the primary institution through which adults take responsibility for each other’s wellbeing. It therefore performs functions that would otherwise fall on the wider community, including supportive care during many kinds of illness and in old age, and shared resources when one partner is unemployed. It also creates a context of reliable sexual access that avoids many of the problems of uncommitted and potentially predatory sexuality.

It will be asked whether same-sex marriages will really perform these functions, and the answer is that, like heterosexual marriages, they will perform these functions, but will do so imperfectly. Women, including lesbians, seem to tend toward sustained relationships and domesticity; men, gay or straight, are comparatively more interested in short term relationships and experimentation. Marriage may soften these differences but will not eliminate them, any more than denying access to marriage leads to continence. The individualistic emphasis in American society means that couples, of whatever kind, are not generally supported by friends and relatives with a continuing investment in their stability, helping them to get beyond problems and conflicts. It will take at least a generation of increased tolerance to assess the stability of partnerships between gay men who have not gone through long periods of self-rejection. But one thing we do know, partly as a result of the epidemic of HIV/AIDS, is that many gay men have cared lovingly for partners in sickness as in health.

The debate about gay marriage has been distorted by the way it is framed. First, let’s stop focusing only on rights and focus on responsibility, encouraging the willingness of same-sex couples to take on long term responsibilities for each other’s well being. Second, let’s assume the on-going presence and social acceptance of gays and lesbians living in consensual relationships without harassment, and notice that there are many reasons to think that legitimizing and stabilizing these relationships will benefit society. Third, let’s respect the right of faith communities to affirm their own customs without constraining others. Most important, let’s all use the vocal desire of same-sex couples to celebrate and prolong their commitments to reexamine the values of marriage for couples of all kinds. Weddings are temporary gatherings, fun for a day; marriage offers long term infrastructure to the whole society.

Speaking as a political independent, I happened to find that news conference further confirmation of our extraordinary good fortune in having a leader with a high wattage brain and concise articulation to go with it. I’m sure I was not alone in recalling eight years of a righteously self-assured president who mangled the mother tongue while dumbing down the official approach to complex problems (”don’t bother me with the facts, we’re creating our own reality”), You might say a 40 watt bulb in a 100 watt outlet.

If investigative journalism implies taking the time and trouble to dig out facts and produce a clear judgment based on them, snap verdicts and quickie sound bites reflecting minimal thought and personal bias represent the opposite.

I find it difficult to understand the allegation that the national media are supine – that they typically roll over and give the president a pass. That may be true of newspaper stories without an attitude, though in fact some stories smuggle in personalized opinions. But an increasing number of Americans get their news and opinions not from ink but from cable, talk radio, and the blogosphere, where (except in this one) few ever get a pass. Maybe it’s because the communications sub-culture is terrified of appearing impressed by any public figures and of being caught praising anything they do. Jefferson might insist that such is the primary mission of the media in a democracy. But add to the mix some Members of Congress, and you get the sense that if this president turned water into wine in living color, the commentariat would denounce him for wasting taxpayer money, if not actually plotting to spread socialism.

The most benign explanation for the reflex put-down is doubtless the fear that if they don’t chew on the presidential ankle they would lose the license to pontificate, not to mention the honorarium.

The President’s report card on foreign affairs is of course a work in progress, full of Incompletes. For this grader, some provisional marks are positive, including: a more nuanced and less ideological approach toward Russia, which will be tough but is at the core of the national interest and worth maximum effort. Also promising is the narrowly refocused strategy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, which drops the one-size-fits-all prescription of American-style democracy for everyone everywhere, in favor of focusing on Al Qaeda and its safe havens, and follows the classic order of Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans to “elevate them guns a little lower”.

But other Incompletes may end up as an E for effort and a C grade, and they constitute a formidable course list. High on that list is the taming of an isolated and paranoid North Korea, coming to acceptable terms with Alexander’s successors in theocracy-ruled Iran, and rethinking missile defense and space militarization. Maybe President Obama will get a B for gaining some version of international solidarity in bailing out the world economy and, perhaps more important, fending off a disastrous replay of the trade protectionism of the 1930’s.

Maybe he will also do better in managing fraught relations with our neighbor to the south, trying to make the UN more effective, managing a strategic shift from Europe to Asia and a redo for NATO which Washington deems benign but Russians still look at through the Cold War filter. The list goes on but for one eternal item – the Sysyphean quest for a Middle East peace — I’m afraid I would place a small bet on ultimately dropping the course. Stay tuned.

By Gloria Feldt As Congress works through the economic stimulus package, representatives need to keep in mind the connection between a woman’s need to determine her reproductive life and her ability to benefit from and contribute to economic recovery and growth. (This is an exclusive commentary I wrote for the Women’s Media Center.)

Arkansas State Senator Paul Van Dalsem got a roaring laugh in 1963 at the then all-male Optimist Club when he railed at women lobbying to improve educational opportunities for African Americans. He said his home county’s solution would be to get an uppity woman an extra milk cow. “And if that’s not enough, we get her pregnant and keep her barefoot.”

Fast forward to January 2009. The relevance of barefoot and pregnant remains central to an inclusive and just America. Economic parity and reproductive justice are still intertwined, not only in the lives of individual women; they are indivisibly connected to our economic recovery as well.

While the 111th Congress awaits President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration for action on his proposed $775-billion stimulus plan, it’s considering two important pieces of legislation not included in the recovery package. Each is treated in isolation as “women’s issues.” Yet both are integral to the success of Obama’s economic stimulus.

The Prevention First Act, sponsored by Representative Louise Slaughter and others to expand access to family planning and reproductive health care, was introduced January 13 to virtually no fanfare and little media coverage. Two gender pay equity bills–the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act–passed the House of Representatives with a bit more hoopla a few days earlier. Here’s how they work together and with the economic recovery.

If a woman is to control anything in her life, she must first be able to control her own fertility –to decide whether, with whom, and when she will have sex, become pregnant, and bear a child. A Catholic priest first made the connection for me between economic and reproductive justice in three short sentences I’ll never forget: “The people in my parish are poor,” he said. “Who am I to tell them they should have a baby every year? I can’t feed or clothe their children for them.”

It was 1969, just a few years after Senator Van Dalsem uttered his famous phrase; I was teaching kindergartners in the Head Start program housed at the priest’s church. Since I wasn’t Catholic, I didn’t know how radical it was for a priest to advocate for birth control. I did know that when I got the birth control pill, I had been able to start college, decide that the three children I had were wonderful but enough already, and consider career possibilities. My job with Head Start didn’t pay much but it moved my family a step beyond paycheck-to-paycheck.

If a woman can’t decide when to have a child, she can’t reliably enter the workforce to earn income for her family’s support, and she can’t contribute her skills to economic growth. That simple equation remains today, exacerbated by our economy’s slide into deep recession.

Conversely, economic power inherently gives women greater power within the family and in society. Virginia Woolf wrote that when her Aunt Mary bequeathed her 500 pounds a year, she found financial independence of more value than even the right to vote. She felt freed from slavery, because she “need not flatter any man” in order to have food, clothing, and shelter.

A woman needs economic equality to freely and successfully make her own choices about sex, pregnancy, and childbearing. As recent news stories of women selling their eggs and use of their wombs have poignantly illustrated, a tough economy can prevent people from having children they desperately want, or push them to use their reproductive capacities for economic necessity. In a New York Times Magazine story, for example, a woman who served as a surrogate was doing so to help pay for her daughter’s college tuition. The daughter in turn was contributing to her college costs by selling her eggs.

Fairness and gender equity benefit everyone. As Linda Hirshman argues in a recent op-ed, while Obama compares his infrastructure plan to the Eisenhower era construction of the interstate highway system,

It brings back the Eisenhower era in a less appealing way as well: there are almost no women on this road to recovery. … Fortunately, jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure–human capital. In 2007, women were 83 percent of social workers, 94 percent of child care workers, 74 percent of education, training and library workers (including 98 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 92 percent of teachers’ assistants).

It’s simplistic to think that giving a woman access to preventive family planning services means she’ll find a great job in or out of the stimulus package. And families that plan and space their children don’t automatically become wealthy or happy.

Nevertheless, the fundamentals remain. For a thriving 21st century economy, America can’t afford to lose half its population’s contributions. The intersection between reproductive and economic justice must become as seamless today as “barefoot and pregnant” was in our history.

As a woman who used Title X funded birth control services–those to be expanded by the Prevention First Act–summed it up, “Times are hard and children are expensive.”