Do Not Curse the Cursive

My oldest typewriter (stashed on a storage shelf) is an Underwood dating to the 1920s. It works though the keys require a heavy touch and the machine itself weighs more than a stack of bricks of equal dimensions. In high school (I graduated 1970) I mostly used an RC Allen from the 1950s that was marginally lighter than the Underwood and much smoother to operate – that is, when I used a typewriter at all. In nearly all my classes, assignments – from essays to full-length term papers – could be handwritten in cursive. Most were. My first portable typewriter was a 1970 Royal that I used through the next four years of college, where everything needed to be typed.

 
Today, only 21 of the 50 states require teaching cursive handwriting in primary schools. Most do anyway, but, required or not, the instruction is likely to be cursory – basically enough so kids can sign their own names and little more. The majority of primary school students even by 8^th grade have serious trouble reading a full page of cursive text. Many educators shrug at this, pointing out that we don’t teach the abacus either in an age when complex calculators are cheap and basic calculators are on every phone. There is some truth to this. Typing skills are similarly far more important than handwriting skills in an age of laptops and personal computers. Still, there is value in being able to read handwritten text. I, for one, more often than not write my checks in cursive just out of habit. Perhaps this annoys younger tellers at the bank.
 
The first patent for a typewriter was issued to Henry Mill by Queen Anne in 1714:
"An artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing, whereby all writings whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so that the said machine or method may be of great use in settlements and publick records, the impression being deeper and more lasting than any other writing, and not to be erased or counterfeited without manifest discovery."
 
No example of this machine survives. It is not known if a prototype was ever built at all. If so, it didn’t impress any contemporary authors of note: no other mention of it has been found in 18^th century literature.
 
In Britain and the US throughout the 19^th century patents were issued and prototypes built for various typewriters, but all the machines for the first seven decades were clumsy to use: in no way faster than a fountain pen in the hand of even a lackadaisical scrivener. The first really practical “Type-writer” was designed by Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule. In 1873 they presented their design to Remington, manufacturer of firearms and sewing machines. Remington took a chance on it. The influence of the sewing division was strong: the Model 1 machine was fixed to a table and the movable carriage was operated by a foot pedal, just like a sewing machine. It was weird but it worked, and it was faster than handwriting. In only a few years the product was refined for more efficient office use: it was detached from furniture and pedal, the movable carriage was redesigned to be hand operated, and lower case letters (the original machine was all caps) were added.
 
Mark Twain was an early adopter. Life on the Mississippi (1883) is believed to have been the first typed manuscript for a book ever delivered to a major publisher. Typed manuscripts quickly became standard (double spaced Courier 12 point please).
 
The next major advance was the word processor (WP) in the 1970s. (I’m ignoring ‘60s electric typewriters since they were an evolutionary step rather than a revolutionary change.) My first word processor was in 1988 or thereabouts. They were still pretty expensive off the shelf (though less than ‘80s computers) but I found a discounted refurbished Brother that some previous customer had returned. The refurbishing must have been done right since the machine worked fine for me. For the first time I could write, edit, and re-edit 100 draft pages stored in memory before printing it out. It changed the way I write. Previously, re-editing meant retyping whole pages – maybe entire documents – so there were a lot of “never mind, that’s good enough” editing decisions. The word processor memory made it easier to say “no that is not good enough” since this usually just meant changing a few words or perhaps a paragraph.
 
The WP also primed me for my first PC in 1993 running Windows 3.1. (I still have a Prodigy address.) This makes me more laggard than early adopter. Even so, as of next year I’ll have been writing on some version of Microsoft Word for 30 years. I’ve been typing (at least occasionally) for 60.
 
Elder Millennials (now nudging into their 40s) in the First World may still remember a time when they did without WPs, PCs, or Macs. Anyone younger does not. Perhaps it is not so surprising if many of them look at penned longhand writing with puzzlement. Perhaps cursive will make a comeback though when kids realize that their (younger Millennial) parents can’t read it. They can leave diaries and incriminating notes out in the open with no fear that the secrets in them will be discovered.

 

Liberace – Typewriter Song

 

 

Soundtracks

Due to limited space I try to keep my home library to its current size of about 2500 books. Since there are constantly new acquisitions (a box from Hamilton discount books arrived just yesterday), I have to remove books from the shelves at the same rate I add them. Shakespeare and Plutarch are safe. So are Heinlein and Herbert. But lesser known scifi or mystery authors are likely to get the boot if I deem some new purchases more shelfworthy. At a minimum, a book is shelfworthy if in principle I might read it again. (Since time also is limited, in practice I might not – in fact, probably will not – reread it, but the principle is that I wouldn’t mind doing so.) On a couple of occasions I’ve tested my choices by randomly picking one book from each of the 50 or so shelves for a reread. So far it has worked out.
 
Similar space constraints apply to the single set of shelves for my CDs and vinyl. Since the space is tighter so is the standard of shelfworthiness. It’s not enough that I might in principle listen to a CD again. To keep it, I have to be pretty darn certain I will listen to it again. Music is supposed to heard time and again. There are CDs on my shelves that I haven’t played in more than a year, but I’m suspicious of them. After two years without being replayed they should go, and most of them do.
 
And yes, most of my music is on CD or vinyl. I’m not a Millennial or Zoomer: my music library is not on my phone. There is not any tune on my phone. Since my most common location for listening to music is in my car, the fact that neither my car nor my truck (both 2021s) has a CD player (nor do most vehicles built in the past decade) is an annoyance. Fortunately, portable CD players that use an auxiliary port to access a car’s stereo are not expensive. Mine gets put to good use – or perhaps bad use from the perspective of a passenger with different tastes in music.
 

Anyway, it is hard not to notice a pattern in the winnowing of my CDs based on the replay standard mentioned above. Although sometimes I deliberately step outside the box with a music purchase (my box, that is: it might be squarely inside another listener’s box, such as recent pop music, most of which is painful to my ears), these outside-the-box CDs after the initial listen-through tend not to get replayed. So, they eventually get selected off the shelf. What remains on my shelves overwhelmingly is blues-based rock-and-roll of the type that dominated the charts in my teens and 20s (the usual suspects: Little Richard, Joplin, Hendrix, Clapton, et al.). Not entirely: there is a pretty good 1940s selection and a smattering of non-rock genres including (a little) classical, but mostly there is rock. The majority is vintage from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Again, not all: there are contemporary bands such as Rival Sons, Dorothy, and the Pretty Reckless that are secure in their places on the shelf, but most of them (including all three named) have vintage sounds. Dorothy even strays into psychedelia (as in Medicine Man or Woman) occasionally.
 
My pattern, for well or ill, is stereotypical. Most people’s musical tastes are set in their youth. We’ve all observed this, but data scientist and op-ed writer for The New York Times Seth Stephens-Davidowitz decided to quantify the effect. Spotify information on downloads and users’ ages proved to be a valuable source. Stephens-Davidowitz determined that women form basic lifelong musical tastes between ages 11 and 14. Men lag a couple years, forming their tastes between 13 and 16. Both tend to evolve a bit and to take new popular music seriously until around 24, after which they typically don’t change much. (There are always outliers, of course, who don’t fit the general stereotype.) These youthful ages are when we form out adult identities and experience key “firsts” in our lives. The music we hear is the soundtrack for that era, and is inevitably tangled with it in our memories. Perhaps the surprising thing is that our attachment to the music of our youth isn’t even stronger.
 
This doesn’t mean we’ll never like anything new and different. We probably will. But odds are it won’t dominate our shelves.
 
Friedrich Nietzsche: “Without music life would be a mistake.” Freddy had a point. So, whatever your preferred genre and whatever your life soundtrack might be, enjoy it. I’m happy with mine being mostly vintage rock. Some other generations (IMO) have done worse.
 

 

Canned Heat – Rock and Roll Music

All Wet

My house, like myself, is aging. Built in 1978, it is considerably younger than I am but is nonetheless solidly in middle age. It calls for significant repairs about as often as I do. You never know what will go next but something will. Sometimes I can handle the issues myself, which keeps the cost down to the materials (and some aches for me). I have rebuilt exterior wooden stairs, repaired retaining walls (both RR tie and masonry), reroofed the barn and shed, and so on. We all have our limitations however. I don’t do mechanicals: for plumbing, electrical, furnace repair, AC maintenance, and the like, I call professionals.
 
This week the problem is a shower leaking through the floor into the ceiling of the finished basement below. Word of advice to anyone who rates functionality over esthetics: don’t build a fancy expensive tile shower. Be cheap and install a fiberglass shower. It is seamless; it doesn’t leak; when it’s installed you’re done. Regrettably, my parents (whose house this was before it became mine) had different views. They chose tile laid over a lead pan. In fairness, this old-fashioned construction technique lasted their lifetimes, but it hasn’t lasted mine. No tile is actually 100% waterproof. Water will get through the grout. This is why there is a lead pan (or other water resistant materials) below the floor tile. But water eventually can defeat this too through corrosion or deformation. My shower has problems with the pipes, faucets, and the pan. A contractor has examined the shower and will get back to me with a cost estimate this coming week. His number, whatever it may be, definitely will be followed by three zeroes.
 
Despite my current trouble and upcoming expense, I like showers in principle. I rarely opt for a bath instead and on those rare occasions wonder why I did. Besides, I typically have to shower off the soap film afterward anyway.
 
Who invented the shower depends on your definition of a shower. If you count waterfalls it wasn’t invented at all, but I think most of us mean something artificial by the term. Some ancient Egyptian art shows wealthy folk having pitchers of water poured on them by their servants, but I don’t think this counts either. The first recorded legitimate showers – with running water piped to outlets overhead – were in ancient Greece as adjuncts to the public baths. The Romans picked up on the idea; many of their public baths had them. Showers disappeared in the Middle Ages, however, primarily because of the lack of running water; aqueducts and other Roman-era water works had fallen into disrepair and disuse by then.

Showers despicted on ancient Greek
pottery. I like the literal shower heads.

The modern shower – like so much of the modern world – was invented in the 18^th century. Englishman William Feetham designed and patented a mechanical shower in 1767 that was operated by means of a hand pump. The water source could be either a tank (as in the patent) or a well. It was clever, but the device didn’t really catch on. Most people don’t want to work that hard when washing off. Running water, whether public or private, was what was missing. This became more common over the next century, however. By the 1880s the day of the “rain shower” in upscale homes had arrived – no hand pump needed. It was usually combined with a tub though dedicated showers did exist. The final key ingredient was hot water. Heating a tank of water and tying it into home plumbing is an obvious idea, but early 19^th century designs (some of them coal or wood fired) were dangerous and messy. The first practical and (reasonably) safe home water heater was designed by Philadelphian (originally Norwegian) engineer Edwin Ruud in 1889. It was a gas-fired water heater not much different from many gas heaters in use today. Electric heaters came along in the 20^th century including tankless ones that don’t store water but heat it as needed.
 
Today, hot showers are a luxury we tend to take for granted – until we don’t have them. Due to current house guests and bathroom locations, the only shower available to me at the moment (other than the leaky one) is in the summer bathroom, which is primarily a changing room located off the porch; this bathroom doesn’t have hot water, which makes using its shower a perky experience. I’m not looking forward to writing the check for the shower repair, but I am looking forward to a less startling temperature when it is again ready for morning duty.
 
 

Chicago - An Hour in the Shower

Keeping Secrets

Several months ago I finally got around to getting my family/personal photo albums in reasonable order. Four ring binders comprise the physical version. There are four digital files, too, saved as Word documents since these are easy to edit by adding and deleting scanned photos, adding or amending commentary, and so forth. The four digital files parallel but don’t quite match the corresponding ring binders. A lot of repetitive photos are excluded from the Word albums while a lot of commentary, including anecdotes and family lore, is added to them. There is less commentary than I initially contemplated though. I seriously considered creating a set of photo-illustrated tell-all biographies that in spots would be unflattering. In the end I decided against it. That’s not really what albums are for. They serve more anodyne purposes: evoking nostalgia in family members who look at them and boredom in others. They are not for revealing dark secrets. Besides, as friends and family members pass (most of the folks in my photos are gone), we survivors tend to get protective of their secrets as well as of our own. In a strange way they become ours to keep.
 
Everyone has secrets. Most of them are selective, which is to say we hide them from some people but reveal them to others whom we trust. There are always limits to trust, however, so there are some secrets we take to the grave. According to David Ludden, Ph.D., writing in Psychology Today, studies show the typical person carries about a dozen of these latter type. Not all of them would seem important to an outsider, but it’s enough that they seem important to the secret-holder. There were obvious obstacles to conducting the studies (the subjects were no more likely to reveal deep secrets to researchers than to anyone else) so most researchers opted for asking the subjects what types of secrets had been revealed to them by confidantes. These likely are the same as (or at least akin to) the secrets folks never reveal. The most common:
 
Infidelity
Having been physically abused or assaulted
Having engaged in physical abuse or assault
Mental illness (anything from minor anxiety to psychosis)
Alcoholism (whether active or not)
Drug abuse
Unacknowledged offspring
Abortion
STDs
Kinky sexual proclivities
Severe financial distress
Orientation
Cheating at work or in academics
Criminal record
Having gotten away with a crime (anything from petty theft to murder)
and (somewhat oddly since I rarely meet people who are reticent about them) Religious beliefs
 
This is far from a comprehensive list. Some past thoughts or deeds that don’t fit those categories are regarded by the secret-holders as simply too embarrassing to share with others. Conversely they may take pride in some act (say, covert revenge) that would seem sociopathic to others. They may not wish to endanger a marriage by admitting an emotional attachment to someone else. The types of secrets are endless. The motive for keeping a secret might be practical (e.g. avoiding breakup or arrest), but most often it is a matter of either self-image or public image.
 
For this reason I always have taken autobiographies with a shaker of salt – especially ones by politicians but by all others as well. I still read them sometimes since they do offer useful stories and insights, but they also certainly leave key secrets out of the narratives. Even Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), whose memoirs run to 12 volumes (!), and whose tales of deceit and seduction are often unflattering to himself, tells us with honesty rare in a memoirist that he left out some of his most depraved adventures due to conscience. (The memoirs are a fun read, by the way; they are available for free at gutenberg.org.)

Casanova 

I haven’t led as exciting a life as Casanova. I’d have trouble filling one volume. I might try it one day anyway. In it I might even reveal some of those secrets I left out of the albums – except for maybe a dozen.

 

Pink – Secrets

Virtual Erudition

The Millennials have aged to the level that Boomers (my group) reached in the 1980s. Perhaps it’s time to reboot the TV show Thirtysomething for them. They are by no means old but already are disconcerted by having been displaced as the representatives of youth culture by Zoomers and Alphas, generations to which they do not entirely relate.
 
[Definitions: Boomers were born between and including 1946 and 1964, GenX 1965-1980, Millennials 1981-1996, GenZ (aka Zoomers) 1997-2010, and Alphas 2011 -present.]
 
A Millennial friend of mine the other day, feeling the changing of the guard, commented to me about how advanced kids are compared to when she was the same age. “They grew up with all this information at their fingertips. There are articles and YouTube videos on everything, so they just know so much more and are so much more sophisticated.” I disagreed and remarked that my admittedly limited experience with them was nothing so encouraging. She again pointed out the vast knowledge available to them. I didn’t wish to argue the matter so I let it go. Besides, it is true that answers (more or less correct ones generally) to almost any question are a few taps on a phone away, but there is a difference between virtual knowledge and knowledge. Being able to google something is not the same as internalizing the information. As far as sophistication goes, it is also true that kids (Alphas as well as Zoomers) are likely to be aware of the edgier cultural issues of the moment. But these are so much in the air as to be essentially pop culture – like knowing the names of the members of a popular band. (I was aware of the cultural issues of the ‘60s, too.) It’s a stretch to call this sophistication.
 
Every generation tends to underestimate previous ones, which is another way of saying they overestimate themselves. My generation was as guilty as any of that arrogance. I recall watching Casablanca years ago with a younger Boomer (b. 1961) who had never seen it because it was an “old movie” and therefore by definition boring. He liked it but then asked in all seriousness if I thought audiences back then “got” all the allusions, double entendres, and irony in the script, as though they couldn’t possibly be as sophisticated as ourselves given the primitive era in which they lived. “They got it,” was all I could say. Zoomers have much the same sort of reservations about Boomers given that by comparison we often remain a bit clunky with electronic devices.
 
I like having answers so readily available thanks to modern technology. I’m no Luddite. Yet there are drawbacks to everything, and the drawbacks to tech affect Zoomers and Alphas the most given their immersion in it and reliance on it. Henry Kissinger in his latest book (my review is a couple of posts ago) worried about this: “While the internet and its attendant innovations are unquestionably technical marvels, close attention must be paid to the balance between the constructive and corrosive habits of mind encouraged by new technology.” He noted the decline of “deep literacy” amid visual culture and quick clicks from link to link: “reading a complex book carefully, and engaging with it critically, has become as counter-cultural an act as was memorizing an epic poem in the earlier print-based age.”
 
I do not know, since Henry doesn’t mention it, but because he uses some of the same terminology I suspect that he is familiar with a book from around a decade ago by Nicolas Carr called The Shallows. Carr examined the question of whether relying on virtual knowledge and virtual memory was making us weak-minded. The answer was a qualified “yes.” Referencing numerous psychological studies, he reported that the internet diminished the time spent “deep reading.” We skim. We follow links, flitting about and often losing track of our initial question. The more hyperlinks an online text contains, the lower is our comprehension of it when we are tested afterwards. Carr quotes T.S. Eliot about being “distracted from distraction by distraction,” which is precisely the kind of quote likely to be used by someone who has done deep reading. Creativity and insight largely involve connecting one piece of knowledge with another in a new way, something quite difficult when the pieces of knowledge aren’t in our own heads. Carr concludes, “What we seem to be sacrificing in our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection.” We become shallower.

 
None of this is inevitable. Nothing prevents a YouTube junkie from reading Nietzsche or Camus cover-to-cover on the side. But it’s not a habit I commonly see in Alphas and Zoomers, though it’s possible I simply meet the wrong ones. On the upside, I suppose virtual knowledge is better than none at all.
 

Questions to random young people

 

Bestemies

Our friends help define us. We say in essence: “I’m the kind of person who likes this bunch of books, plays that collection of music, and has those friends.” Our enemies do too, though more so if we choose them than if they choose us. (Sometimes folks can have it in for you for reasons of their own that have little or nothing to do with you in particular.) Among the more interesting relationships, though, are friendly enemies. These relationships usually require face to face interaction to develop, which is why they may be less frequent in an online world that is conducive to dehumanizing one’s opponents, but they still exist.
 
G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary are a prime example. I’m painfully aware that there are at least two generations over the age of 18 to whom those names mean little, but they loomed large in my youth. Leary was the psychologist and psychedelic guru who touted the wonders of LSD and urged listeners to “tune in, turn on, drop out.” Convicted on drug charges, he escaped prison with the help of the Weather Underground. He was re-apprehended but was pardoned in 1975 by Governor Brown of California. Liddy was the FBI agent who had led the raid in 1966 on a New York estate where Leary and his followers were conducting experiments. During the Nixon Administration Liddy planned, conducted, and botched the Watergate break-in that ultimately forced the president to resign. Liddy and Leary both ended up in the same prison. In 1977 President Carter commuted Liddy’s sentence. (Neither man was shy to write about himself: Will by G. Gordon Liddy and The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary are both worth a read.) To the public Liddy was the face of a corrupt authoritarian establishment. Leary was the face of the counterculture. In the 1980s the two went on speaking tours together and became the best of friends even though they remained philosophically opposed. Their mutual respect and playfulness is obvious in Alan Rudolph’s 1983 documentary film Return Engagement.

Perhaps an even odder couple were Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt. These, too, were once household names that... well… no longer are. Larry Flynt in the 1970s was founder and editor of Hustler. This publication was nothing so innocent as Playboy; it was porn. Flynt was a radical free speech advocate who constantly faced obscenity charges. While in Georgia on account of one such charge in 1978, he and his lawyer were shot on the sidewalk. Flynt survived but damage to his spinal cord confined him to a wheelchair thereafter. Jerry Falwell was a televangelist and head of the Moral Majority, a lobby group for the religious right. (Incidentally, he was also cousin to Jerry Lee Lewis.) The Moral Majority was very high profile in the 1980s. Among its targets was porn. Flynt decided to satirize Falwell in Hustler in 1983 with a fake alcohol ad that recounted a tale of Falwell supposedly losing his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued for libel demanding $45,000,000. Flynt lost the lawsuit in the trial court and then lost an appeal, but he then appealed to the Supreme Court, which took the case. In a unanimous decision Flynt won. The Court defended the right to satire regardless of good or bad taste.
 
The 1996 movie The People vs. Larry Flynt gets the basics of the Flynt/Falwell battle more or less right, but it ends without mentioning what happened next. Jerry Falwell approached Larry Flynt to make peace. The two chatted for an hour. They hit it off and decided to go on debating tours together. Jerry would push Larry’s wheelchair into and out of the engagements. They joked and sparred and enjoyed each other’s company. Said Flynt, “I disagreed with him on absolutely everything: gay rights, a woman’s right to choose, everything. But after getting to know him I realized he was sincere.” They remained friendly enemies.
 
Those two cases are more dramatic than anything I’ve experienced, but I have had small tastes of something similar. Back in the 1980s, for example, there was a young lady who was the most intellectually challenging of any of my serious involvements. (Not “the one that got away” – she was a decade earlier – but serious nonetheless.) We traded and debated books of all types. I was a libertarian while she was a former SDS member whom I called (without irony) “my favorite Marxist.” Our first principles couldn’t have been more different. Yet we worked for over three years, and when things ended philosophical differences had nothing to do with it.
 
It may be that we cheat ourselves when we refuse to associate “with people like that,” meaning folks with outlooks radically different from our own. (Of course there are some people who really are beyond the pale such as the fellow who shot Larry, but there is a temptation to cast our nets too wide.) We miss out on friendly enemies.

 

Johnny Rivers – Enemies and Friends

Henry Is at It Again

The oldest surviving Cabinet member from any Administration, the 99-y.o. (!) Henry Kissinger continues to surprise with his ongoing analyses of foreign policy. Kissinger served formally in three Administrations (Kennedy, Nixon, Ford) and informally has consulted with nearly every other Administration from Eisenhower onward. One has to go back to Tallyrand to find a statesman with longevity like that despite changes in governments. He hasn’t entirely escaped the physical effects of time but his faculties are intact. He remains the smartest man in the room. His latest (last?) book released this July is Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy in which he profiles six pivotal leaders (Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher) all of whom he knew personally. Each, despite flaws, had a major impact on national strategy and global order.

 
It would be negligent to fail to acknowledge that many folks (including more than a few journalists) regard Kissinger as the devil incarnate for his practice of realpolitik. (This always struck me as a strange word to intend as an insult. As opposed to what, fantasiepolitik?) His Westphalian approach (referring to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia) of leaving the internal affairs of other nations (who may not share our values) largely out of consideration in matters of diplomacy and geostrategy strikes them as callous (or worse) toward human rights. Kissinger’s point of view was that guaranteeing human rights around the world is outside the scope and power of the US government, and that nothing is more dangerous to them anyway than an unbalanced world order that leads to a wide war. Strategy therefore takes priority in diplomacy, such as the normalization of relations with China, done to counter the growing power (at the time) of the Soviet Union. Should he have forgone reopening relations as Nixon’s envoy with China because of the mounting casualties of the Cultural Revolution? It is possible for opponents to disagree on these points without either being fools or evil.
 
For 20^th century historians, the six bios in this book are a gold mine. To be sure, they are necessarily abbreviated: the book is 416 pages plus footnotes. Nonetheless within their lengths they are erudite, insightful, and informed by first-hand knowledge. They make clear that historical developments that in retrospect seem inevitable were really anything but. The resolution of key crises (whether in the Falklands, the Sinai, Algeria, or elsewhere) took leadership by leaders who went against conventional wisdom and political convenience: “they did not strive for, or expect, consensus.” All, accordingly, were divisive, as of course is Kissinger himself. I personally found the section on Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore 1959-90, the most interesting precisely because he did not represent a major power. He nevertheless navigated among the major powers while guiding the city state to astonishing prosperity as a global business and finance hub. Per capita income in Singapore in the 21^st century is always in the top 5 nations: sometimes #1 depending on exchange rates.
 
In his concluding chapter Kissinger laments the decline of “deep reading” amid the rise of visual culture, which enhances the biases of immediacy, intensity, polarity and conformity: “in an age dominated by television and the internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.” He remains hopeful that some, though currently obscure, will arise to meet the challenges anyway. Providing fodder to both his supporters and antagonists, he quotes Machiavelli that in adversity “out of necessity the people turn to those who in tranquil times were almost forgotten.”
 
Thumbs up.

Good Morning America Interview