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The history of American burlesque [timeline]

Burlesque is an exotic dance style that draws on theatrical and often comedic performance elements. First introduced by a visiting British dance troupe in the 1860s, burlesque took off in America even as its popularity dwindled in England. The American style of burlesque evolved and spread across the country, but with an increased emphasis the exotic elements that had been more subtle in British performances. The following timeline highlights key moments in the history of American burlesque.

Featured image provided by Matilda Temperley. Please do not re-use without permission.

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Savings banks in Germany: welfare versus politics

In Germany, it is not uncommon for primary-school children to have their own savings account. A reason for this is that on World Savings Day, savings-bank representatives visit schools all over Germany to educate pupils about the benefits of saving. Besides being clever marketing, this program is rooted in the savings banks’ legal pledge to foster economic welfare: German state law requires savings banks to support the local economy, to provide account access to people from all socio-economic backgrounds, to grant loans to local small-to-medium-sized enterprises, and to educate children about basic economic knowledge. In this, they are quite similar to development banks. In fact, they were founded – and are still owned – by local governments to fulfill this developmental purpose. For these reasons, German savings banks are subject to supervision by local politicians.

What sounds like an innocuous framework necessary to enact welfare-enhancing policy, may come with strings attached: Institutionalized political control via the savings bank’s board of directors creates an opportunity for incumbent county politicians to influence bank activities. Specifically, politicians may push for more lavish lending before an election to boost economic conditions, the mood of the electorate, and, ultimately, their re-election prospects.

To test whether politicians use their power over savings banks with respect to their lending activities, we analyzed a dataset that covers all German savings banks over a time span of more than twenty years. We contrast the changes in savings-bank lending to the lending changes of cooperative banks, which allows us to exclude any factors that might increase lending other than political manipulation, as cooperative banks have a very similar business model to savings banks, but no political linkages. We also compare the behavior of savings banks in states that held an election in any given year with those that did not. These two strategies ensure that we identify causal effects of elections on lending.

Our data confirms that there are strong side effects of political control over savings banks. In an election year, savings-bank lending increases by roughly 1.5% on average, which corresponds to approximately EUR 30 million per bank. We also find suggestive evidence that these extra-marginal loans depress bank profitability, and that they are more prone to default.

Intriguingly, the documented pattern is especially pronounced for counties in which politicians face a highly contested election, suggesting that the costly manipulation of bank activities is reserved for situations when the incumbent’s fate is in real jeopardy. Given the generally beneficial role of political competition for social efficiency, it is remarkable that it catalytically generates unintended consequences, in the form of intensified political rent-seeking, when combined with another principally welfare-enhancing institutional feature necessary to implement the developmental mission of savings banks.

Considering that savings banks constitute an important pillar of the German banking system, and that they are the main lender to private customers and small-to-medium-sized enterprises, it is worrisome to find their policies substantially distorted. Currently, savings banks are exempt from regulation and supervision through the European Central Bank due to their size. Germany lobbied for this arrangement, but our findings raise the question whether this decision is tenable.

Ultimately, whether the documented unintended consequences of government control cause more harm than good, or whether they are an inevitable – but tolerable – concession to adamant political incentives in the process of public-good provision remains a question for future research.

Featured image credit: Piggy Bank by pictures of money. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Rousseau, self-love, and an increasingly connected world

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century French enlightenment period. Born in Geneva in 1712, Rousseau made important contributions to philosophy, literature, and even music. The work that initially made him famous is the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, his submission to an essay contest put forth by the Academy of Dijon in 1750. Rousseau’s answer to their prompt “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?” won the prize, although his answer was somewhat surprising given the ideals one generally associates with enlightenment. He claimed that advances in the sciences and arts come at the expense of virtue. The argument proceeds on a number of levels, but one of Rousseau’s most striking claims was that societies that value scientific and artistic progress come to praise talent instead of genuine moral goodness. He wrote, “One no longer asks if a man is upright, but rather if he is talented; nor of a book if it is useful, but if it is well written. Rewards are showered on the witty, and virtue is left without honors. There are a thousand prizes for noble discourses, none for noble actions.”

Rousseau’s concern about the corruption of virtue in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts is a theme that would run through the rest of his principal works, and would come to be articulated as a key part of his moral psychology. Rousseau claimed that human beings are possessed of two types of “self-love.” The first, amour de soi, is simply the interest we take in our own survival and comfort. The second, amour-propre, is inherently relational. That is, it is a kind of value we place on ourselves on the basis of receiving recognition from others. To understand amour-propre, one must know a bit about Rousseau’s conception of human nature. Following philosophers in the century before him such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Rousseau conceived of human beings in a state of nature. That is, he imagined human beings stripped of all those characteristics that they could only have acquired by the conventions of human society. Human beings in the state of nature are primitive, pre-social, isolated, do not exercise complex reasoning, and act largely from instinct. Amour-propre is undeveloped in this state. Only when human beings begin to form social relationships with one another will they begin to take notice of what others think of them. In the earliest human societies, those marked by small groups of families, amour-propre becomes part of the human experience. However, it is relatively benign, and Rousseau called this era the happiest in human history.

Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau circa 1753, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour.

Musée Antoine-Lécuyer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

As civilization develops, he claimed that amour-propre becomes inflamed, and we end up with a society marked by gross and unjust inequality, a lack of genuine compassion for others, and the kind of superficial set of values that Rousseau rails against in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. In short, humans become driven by a desire for recognition and approval regardless of whether or not that recognition is due to something that is truly worthy of respect. At its worst, people think nothing of tearing others down so that they might feel superior themselves. Rousseau was deeply concerned with the dangers inflamed amour-propre produces and the question of how we might overcome them. He gave one short answer in his comprehensive work on moral education, the Emile. One of his claims was that people in large cosmopolitan settings such as eighteenth century Paris are particularly susceptible to the worst vices of amour-propre. Rousseau clearly thinks it much more likely that virtue will better flourish in rural communities. Rousseau likely believed this at least in part because these less urban environments more closely resemble the earlier times in human history mentioned above in which we lived closer to nature.

These Rousseauian ideas, I believe, provide an interesting lens through which to view features of our own society. Specifically, I am thinking about the way that an increasingly online world connects human beings to one another in a way that not too long ago would have been difficult to even conceive. If Rousseau was wary of amour-propre’s dangers in more populated areas like the Paris of his time, what would he think of forums like Facebook and Twitter? Indeed, I think the Academy of Dijon’s question about the sciences and arts is poignant for us with respect to the age of the internet and social media. Has this tended to purify morals? One might say no. This connectedness has resulted in new forms of what Rousseau would undoubtedly describe as inflamed amour-propre. We post pictures of ourselves, various thoughts we have, descriptions of various events that anger us, all the while looking to see how many “likes” we get. Trolling is common in online forums, with people not hesitating to say vicious things online that they would likely never say to someone’s face. Cyber bullying has become an all too common. We also observe the phenomena of people constructing online profiles in the hope of getting recognition and praise, even if the profile does not really resemble whom he or she really is. I think Rousseau would claim that all of this comes at the expense of virtue. So, on the whole, are we better, worse, or unchanged for all of the technological advances that allow for this new interconnectedness? And if we are worse, is there hope for us to make changes? Rousseau himself became increasingly pessimistic about curing the ills of amour-propre. He ultimately retreated from society altogether, in sense returning to nature. I am less pessimistic, but I think Rousseau raised important cautions for his contemporaries that are still very much worth thinking about for us even more than 300-years later.

Featured Image credit: Statue of Rousseau, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Republics, empires, and civilizations

Is President Trump our second emperor? Former President Obama resembles the statues that Augustus, the first emperor of ancient Rome, distributed for worship. Obama’s calm reign, his effective executive orders and avoidance of conflict, also recall Augustus. President Trump could be Tiberius, the messier successor of Augustus, who preferred Capri to Rome, as Trump prefers Mar-a-Lago to Washington. Unlike Augustus, Tiberius was never declared a god by the Senate.

Behind the funny parallel lies a point. We should admit, without apocalyptic rhetoric, that politics here and elsewhere are moving in an imperial direction. We live in a system of empires, international networks of power, that are not just American but also Chinese, Russian, British, French, Turkish, Iranian, Arab, and even Roman Catholic. Civil religions, the religions of state ceremonies, monuments, and official values, are being adjusted to suit empire in all these places.

Empires are not bad in all respects, and every form of political organization has special evils. Democracy, monarchy, nationalism, socialism, oligarchy, aristocracy all bring good and evil effects. Republics allow many forms of political power to work within a representative government. But successful republics develop into empires. It happened in ancient Athens and Rome, then among 15th-century Venetians. Worldwide empires sprang from republics of the 16th-century Dutch, 17th century English, 18th century Americans, and 19th century French.

Empires are not democratic. Usually, they promote or allow slavery. Elected leaders turn into autocrats, controlling international domains by fiat. Politicians become oligarchs, using public offices to amass wealth. Empires make wonderful monuments, from the Parthenon in Athens and the Pantheon in Rome to our memorials for Washington, Lincoln, Vietnam, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and World War Two. Imperial civil religion is expansionist and inclusive.

Empires are not democratic. Usually, they promote or allow slavery.

An imperial system can retain democratic fluidity, allowing access to power from many directions for talented people. Empires often promote cultural and ethnic pluralism, tolerance, and exchanges of religions, ideas, and arts. Rome showed that states moving from republic to empire may last thousands of years. The Roman Empire actually still continues, spiritually in the Roman Catholic Church and politically in the United States. Our Senate, our capital city, and our mixed form of government take their models from Rome. Every year, our president reports on the state of the union standing between metal fasces that represent the bundles of rods and axes, the instruments of punishment and execution that were carried before Roman consuls.

Presidents since Washington and Jefferson have deployed military power at will. But earlier presidents did not have the power to act immediately as an imperator—an imperial military commander—that presidents now have. Presidents now can attack targets thousands of miles away, without putting any troops at risk, in minutes. Our presidents now command a military with about 49,000 soldiers in Japan, 38,000 in Germany, and 28,000 in South Korea, with eleven aircraft carrier groups and eighteen missile submarines prowling the oceans. We maintain nearly 800 military bases in 70 nations. Only the British have had anything like this imperial reach.

Two rivals of the United States, Russia and China, have both lately modified their republics and revived imperial traditions. Russia had a republic in 1996, when President Clinton helped Boris Yeltsin gain re-election as president. President Putin apparently took revenge in 2016. Within Russia, Putin plays up the eagle from Czarist times and the Russian Orthodox Church. He has alternated as president and prime minister to consolidate an era of one-man control that will likely extend from 1999 through 2024, and possibly beyond.

In the People’s Republic of China, which has a system of leadership teams with term limits, Xi Jinping became Paramount Leader—leader of government bureaucrats, of the Communist Party, and of the military—in 2013. Before Xi, only Chairman Mao, the founding demigod of this Chinese state, and Deng Xiaoping, who turned toward capitalism, have held this title. Xi encourages Confucian traditions, respectful of emperors, in Chinese education. In empires, peace may be enforced without justice. Most imperial leaders feel free to reject democratic norms like press freedom. During an interview with Megyn Kelly that aired on June 4, President Putin challenged Kelly’s right to ask several questions. During and after the first Republican debate in August of 2015, Donald Trump challenged Kelly’s right to question him.

Emperors expect to have the last word. They speak from between the fasces, the rods and axes. But the forms of republics, like the ancient Roman Senate and our own, may persist and retain some power even under emperors. Let us continue to work and to hope for as much personal freedom, political democracy, peace, and tolerance as we can get in this imperial age.

Featured image credit: Emperor Tiberius, by Jastrow. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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The Italian and Gothic literature [video]

The Italian is a gripping tale of love and betrayal, abduction and assassination, and incarceration in the dreadful dungeons of the Inquisition. Uncertainty and doubt lie everywhere. Ann Radcliffe defined the “terror” genre of writing and helped to establish the Gothic novel, thrilling readers with her mysterious plots and eerie effects. In The Italian she rejects the rational certainties of the Enlightenment for a more ambiguous and unsettling account of what it is to be an individual–particularly a woman–in a culture haunted by history and dominated by institutional power.

Watch as Professor Nick Groom, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Italian, discusses Ann Radcliffe’s last novel and how she influenced Gothic literature.

Featured image credit: “A 19th-century depiction of Galileo before the Holy Office” by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The imaginative power and feminism of Harriet Prescott Spofford

“A Flaming Fire Lily Among the Pale Blossoms of New England” poignantly points to the paradoxical nature behind the imaginative power of notable American author Harriet Prescott Spofford. No, she is no longer with us today, having produced most of her work during the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, but to those of us lucky enough to have encountered her tales of romance and the supernatural, we can only believe that Gothic genius came much earlier than Ann Rice and Joyce Carol Oates. During her time, Spofford published continuously in periodicals, offering short stories, serialized novels, poetry, and articles for adults and children. Despite her long career (over 60 years) and impressive list of publications, Spofford has been neglected by critics and only recently has she been resurrected from the footnote. To overlook this writer who challenged stereotypical depictions of women, blending the colors of romance with the realities of her New England environment, while introducing us to the very first female authored serial detective—A Mr. Furbush—is to shortchange our literary history.

Born in Calais, Maine in 1849, Spofford moved with her parents to Newburyport, Massachusetts, which would be her eventual resting place. She attended the Putnam Free School in Newburyport, and Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire, both prestigious schools that indicate a very high level of formal schooling, quite a feat for a woman during this time. At the age of 16, she won a prize for the best essay on Hamlet, which drew the attention of well-known editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who soon became her friend, and gave her counsel and encouragement. Economic hardship, however, owning back to Spofford’s ship-owning grandfather who lost his fortune in the War of 1812, propelled her toward writing for money, especially when her father returned from a Western prospecting trip with little to show for it. Soon after, Spofford began writing short stories to augment her father’s meager income from running a boarding house, so she set to work publishing anonymous pulp fiction in various Boston papers, sometimes laboring fifteen hours a day and making as little as $2.50 a story. One day in 1859, however, she caught a break. She sent “In a Cellar,” a dark story about Parisian life, to the venerable Atlantic Monthly which was edited by the well-known James Russell Lowell. Believing the story to be a translation, he at first rejected it, but after being assured by Higginson of its originality—“I had to be called into satisfy them that a demure little Yankee girl could have written it”—he sent Spofford a check for $100 commending her work.” From then on, her stories were gobbled up by a reading public secretly enjoying the many tales of the supernatural she penned.

Although Spofford was often held up as a model of behavior for other “lady authors,” she was also often criticized for her excessive description that lacked realistic precision. Spofford’s fiction had very little in common with what was regarded as representative of New England life. Her Gothic romances were set apart by luxuriant descriptions, and she had a gift for creating atmosphere through vivid descriptions, using setting and object to capture character, and playing with the passionate and often amoral aspects of human behavior. And yet she was an artist of Romance living in the age of literary Realism. Her dedication to descriptions and fancies ushered in some scathing criticism from male contemporaries who felt she needed to wrangle in her emotions and write with a more realistic temperament.

Portrait drawing of United States writer Harriet Prescott Spofford. Published in Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, v. 5, 1900, p. 633. Jacques Reich, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

So, she did what any God-fearing early feminist would do—she continued to write and publish more Gothic fiction. In fact, Emily Dickinson once wrote to Higginson on 25 April 1862, “I read Miss Prescott’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me in the Dark—so I avoided her.” To her sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert, Dickinson conveyed, “Sue, it is the only thing I ever read in my life that I didn’t think I could have imagined myself,” and despite her comment to Higginson, she begged Sue to “send me everything she writes.” This story, based on an incident that actually happened to Spofford’s maternal great-grandmother, describes a woman who spends an entire winter night pinned motionless in a tree by a panther, known as the “Indian Devil.” The heroine must continue to sing, hoping to lull the beast to sleep so that she can escape. She eventually does (after her husband finds her and shoots the beast) only to return to a home burned by Native Americans.

There have been calls of late for critical attention to Spofford’s long-neglected works and most of these calls have cited “Circumstance” (1860), a story concerned with issues of women’s voice. Most recently, editors have called attention to “Her Story” (1872), a tale of rivalry between two women, both unnamed, one the wife of a wealthy minister and the other his ward. The wife narrates her story from the madhouse to which she has been committed – “bur[ied] . . . alive” in “this grave” by her husband Spencer. “Her Story” in many ways anticipates the themes and critical interests of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” (published two decades later). Like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Her Story” offers a critique of the social conventions that oppress women, but unlike Gilman’s later tale, “Her Story” is not really concerned with the divisions between men and women, but rather with the origins and significance of divisions among women. Specifically, it explores the way the oppositions common to male- and female-authored fictions (blond-passive-chaste; dark-aggressive-sexual) serve to divide women from each other. Spofford’s adaptation of the Gothic mode demonstrates how the concept of the “other woman” objectifies the status of woman as “other” in the service of intra-gender warfare. For all their apparent differences, the two rivals are shown to be more co-conspirators, both equally subject to male authority, continuously perpetuated by the myths of our culture.

Indeed, Spofford’s work did not always deal with feminist concerns, but following her love of the Gothic, she explored detective fiction as well. In fact, Harriet Spofford is the first woman writer to introduce us to a serial detective in crime fiction, anticipating latter detectives created by such authors as Metta Victor and Anna Katharine Green. “In a Cellar” presents a quasi detective—“[i]t is not often that I act as a detective”—that would be given full form in “Mr. Furbush” (1865) where he works with the New York police and is “a man of genteel proclivities, fond of fancy parties and the haut ton, curious in fine women and aristocratic defaulters and peculators.” He reappears again in “In the Maguerriwock,” (1868) where he works as a private detective. There are so many more stories to be found, perhaps leaving us to wonder if Mr. Furbush does somehow live on in the stacks of old libraries.

The works collected in A Scarlet Poppy (1894) are light satire, quite different from the more somber collection Old Madame and Other Tragedies (1900). Spofford’s days in Washington with her husband provide the basis for the sentimental stories in Old Washington (1906), and her final collection, often considered her best, The Elder’s People (1920), returns to New England. These stories reflect the dry humor, realities, believable dialect, and even restraint of New England life, all of which earned her high praise. Yet the women in these narratives remain as strong as ever. They face the realistic necessities of life, live with the limited perceptions of their men, and triumph through the art they create. Spofford always finds the cerulean and azure threads woven into the browns and grays of the New England life and the women she knew so well.

Featured Image credit: Photo accompanying chapter by Harriet Prescott Spofford entitled “Camp Cookery” from American Home and Gardens, Volume 10, New York: Munn and Co, 1913. Photo by Mary H. Northend, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The long history of political social media

One of the key stories of the last US presidential election was the battle of words and images fought by supporters of the candidates on social media, or what one journalist has called “The Great Meme War” of 2016. From hashtag slogans like #FeelTheBern and #MakeAmericaGreatAgain to jokey internet memes like “Nasty Women” and “The Deplorables,” public participation in political advocacy and promotion has reached a fever pitch in the age of networked digital technologies.

After the election ended, this activity has only seemed to intensify with each Trump-related meme of the day, even hour. Citizens are not only following politicians on a range of social media platforms, but are also actively spreading messages of endorsement and opposition by posting and sharing digital content that essentially functions as political advertising. However, although these practices have now reached a level of prominence perhaps never before, they are far from new. Rather, they represent only the latest phase of a long and unheralded tradition of citizen participation in the spread of political messages.

Prior to the advent of online platforms like Twitter and Facebook, participation in the landscape of political communication flourished in the form of material culture—banners, sashes, and ribbons, and eventually more modern items like T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers. Back in the nineteenth century, before politicians were able to take advantage of the broadcast airwaves to bring their messages directly to voters, they depended upon their supporters to act as surrogate message carriers at public events such as parades and rallies.

The William Henry Harrison campaign of 1840 was a watershed moment in this participatory election spectacle, as enthusiastic supporters engaged in actions like rolling giant balls made of buckskin through the city covered with campaign slogans like “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Over a century before Twitter, the ‘great meme wars’ of presidential politics were waged in the streets between everyday citizens who filled the public vistas with the messages of their favored parties and candidates.

This tradition diminished in importance in the twentieth century, when political candidates began using radio and eventually television to deliver slickly-produced campaign advertisements without the mediation of surrogate message carriers. However, although formalized mass displays like parade processions eventually became old-fashioned, a more informal tradition of citizen political expression started to build steam in the context of Postwar countercultures. For the hippie generation, political expression became intertwined with cultural self-expression, bringing message-sending and statement-making into the spaces and places of everyday life. Slogan buttons like “Make Love, Not War” became a part of everyday dress and effortlessly broadcasted one’s political beliefs to onlookers while moving through public space.

3.15.2008 by Danielle Buma. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

Around this time, a new ethos was emerging of the individual as a screen for promoting new social identities and worldviews—an alternative, grassroots media channel that set itself in opposition to mainstream media and advertising dominated by the status quo. No one epitomized this more than the hippie icon John Lennon, who made a point of promoting an anti-Vietnam War message in all aspects of his life (such as wearing T-shirts in public adorned with the peace sign). As Lennon remarked, “‘Henry Ford knew how to sell cars by advertising. I’m selling peace at whatever the cost. Yoko and I are just one big advertising campaign.”

This notion of using personalized expressive channels to become an advertisement for favored political messages—what I refer to as the citizen marketer approach to political action—proved to be highly influential in the following decades. By the 1980s, wearing slogan T-shirts to make public political statements had become a notable fashion trend, especially in the form of designer Katharine Hamnett’s famous block-letter environmentalist shirts like “Stop Acid Rain” and “Worldwide Nuclear Ban Now.”

Election campaigns and their supporters embraced the trend as well, and by the 1992 presidential race between Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, there were so many election-themed T-shirts in circulation that the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York devoted an entire museum exhibition to it. As curators Richard Martin and Harold Koda put it,

The candidate may throw his or her hat into the ring, but the voter can actively participate as well long before Election Day in sartorial persuasion and expression. There are those who believe that sound bites and media-centric campaigning have displaced the grassroots democracy in which opinions are freely expounded and exchanged neighbor to neighbor. Perhaps the intensity of this year’s T-shirts gives us reason to believe that voters are ready to speak out.

Replace “sartorial” with “social media” and “T-shirts” with “tweets,” and their words sound strikingly familiar. Indeed, they illustrate that the impetus for everyday people to participate in the political media landscape did not originate with the appearance of peer-to-peer digital technologies. Rather, today’s ‘great meme wars’ on the internet descend from long traditions of citizen-level political expression that are grounded in material culture practices such as dress.

Looking at this history of material culture as the predecessor to today’s social media helps contextualize many of the current debates and controversies around online political expression. For instance, in the 1980s, slogan T-shirts like Hamnett’s were a frequent target of derision for seemingly dumbing down political discourse—a preview of the ‘slacktivism’ critique of political social media that frames it as empty and lacking in substance. By contrast, during the same decade, the ruling party in apartheid South Africa banned the public display of T-shirts featuring the symbol of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Such an action demonstrates the feared persuasive power of grassroots citizen media, foreshadowing the current wave of governments around the world shutting down internet access and blocking social media sites to quell oppositional voices.

Like their material cultural forbearers, tweets, memes, and viral videos have the potential to shape the flow of political ideas, one citizen at a time—even as they draw from repertoires of cultural expression that often clash with the norms of elite political discourse.

Featured image credit: Social Media apps by Jason Howie. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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How well do you know Swami Vivekānanda [quiz]

This June, the OUP Philosophy team honors Swami Vivekānanda (born Narendranath Datta, 1863–1902) as their Philosopher of the Month. Born in Calcutta under colonial rule, Vivekānanda became a Hindu religious leader, and one of the most prominent disciples of guru and mystic Śri Rāmakṛṣṇa. After delivering a highly regarded speech as the Hindu delegate to the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, Vivekānanda gained worldwide recognition before returning to India to found the Ramakrishna Mission. Vivekānanda inspired a newfound pride in the hearts of Hindus as his non-dualistic, Advaita Vedānta philosophy helped spread the spiritual traditions of India to the Christian West.

How much do you know about Swami Vivekānanda? Put your knowledge to the test with our quiz!

Quiz image: Swami Vivekananda, 1893. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image: Taj Mahal landscape. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Seeing light element lithium with electron microscopy

Remember your cell phone, laptop computer, tablet, and other mobile electronic devices? Most of these devices employ “lithium-ion batteries (LIBs)” which allow for the significant size reduction of batteries due to the high energy-density per unit volume – in other words, there is a high density of electric carries that can be used in charging/discharging of batteries. In addition to these mobile devices, LIBs can be now applied to the power sources used in electric/hybrid vehicles. As storage batteries are incorporated to wind-power, solar-power, and other such natural power systems that do not contribute to greenhouse gas-emission, LIBs can also play a role in overcoming global environmental issues.

Nevertheless, for further developments of LIBs, we still have big challenges. One of the technical problems is of safety in conventional LIBs since they use a flammable liquid electrolyte; as a precaution, used batteries should be collected in order to avoid fire accidents. In addition, both durability and period of charging are issues that need further improvements. Although some other types of batteries (e.g., solid-state batteries made of only non-flammable solid components) can solve the flammability problem, we still have significant discussions about the mechanisms underlying the charging and discharging phenomena.

Electron microscopy for lithium detection can be a key for the further progress in science and engineering of LIBs, as it provides essential information for understanding the basic mechanisms of lithium-ion motion during charging and discharging. For example, when we can determine the specific sites or positions in the positive-electrode crystal from which lithium ions can be retracted during charging, the results provide highly useful information for avoiding the undesired deterioration of crystallinity (i.e., formation of structural defects in the electrode crystal) induced by charging/discharging cycles. The deterioration in crystallinity actually causes unwanted resistance for the lithium transportation. Another contribution of electron microscopy is a direct observation of the electric field produced in a LIB—i.e., revealing the electrostatic potential lines within a LIB during charging/discharging, in addition to the conventional crystal structure analysis using an electron probe. Actually, researchers are highly interested in the examination of a significant drop in the electrostatic potential, referred to as an “electric double layer”, which can be generated in the interface between electrode and electrolyte. The observations provide conceptual insights not only for the basic science of batteries but also for new classes of device engineering, for example, new types of field emitter transistors, using ionic liquid and other useful electrolytes.

“Electron microscopy for lithium detection can be a key for the further progress in science and engineering of LIBs”

From a viewpoint of the methodology of electron microscopy, however, lithium detection is a challenge since lithium is a light element (heavier than just hydrogen and helium in the periodic table) which allows only weak interaction in our electron probe. To tackle this problem, researchers use special methods of imaging, including annular bright-field scanning transmission electron microscopy (abbreviated by ABF-STEM) that can be highly sensitive to the light elements. Electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS), which examines the energy-loss in probe electrons that have traversed a battery specimen, provides another route for determining the positions of lithium ions within batteries. Another useful tool is electron holography, which is a type of interferometry using electron probes. This method can visualize the electrostatic potential variations that may be induced by electrode potential changes due to the lithium insertion/extraction reaction. We should notice an essential role of the advanced method of specimen preparation on the achievement of electron microscopy studies. For example, a sophisticated technique of the specimen preparation allows for “operando observation” which represents a direct observation of the charging and/or discharging phenomena of LIBs using electron microscopy.

Using new tools with ultrahigh resolution and/or sensitivity is vitally important for progress in science. For example, with reference to the issues of astrophysics, detection of the extremely weak signal due to gravitational waves (predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago) could be achieved thanks to advanced technologies to reduce the noise and any other uncertainties in observations. Regarding the science and technology related to LIBs, which also require sophisticated experiments for detection of the light element lithium, advanced electron microscopy methods shed further light on understanding the physics, chemistry, and engineering underlying the charging and discharging phenomenon.

Featured image credit: ‘Computer-display-electronics’ by Pexels. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay .

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Twenty years of Pottering

It’s difficult to imagine a Harry Potter-less world.

This is not simply because since the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997 the numbers attached to the franchise have become increasingly eye-watering, but because, quite unintentionally (perhaps), what began as a modest fantasy for children has helped to turn the literary world upside-down.

What these high- or highest-profile books have done is to hammer another nail into the coffin of absolute (and undefined) literary value, and to reinforce the point that children’s books and adult books do not necessarily belong to the same literary system. Back in 2000, there was the curious spectacle of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban coming head-to-head with Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf for the British Whitbread Literary award. One judge declared that it would be a “national disgrace” if Rowling won (she didn’t). Today, Joanne Rowling (OBE) is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the most prestigious British literary body, established to “reward literary merit.” How times change.

The literary establishment’s problems in the face of Harry’s success were summed up by the sad plight of the New York Times. When Potter books held the top three places on their hardback bestseller list, the editors started a children’s list, and when Potter dominated that, they started a series list. Not surprisingly, they came in for a good deal of satire for muddled, if not muggled, thinking.

What made it all the more tricky was that the Potter books revived the idea of the “crossover” book – a book read by children and adults equally. There was nothing new in this – before, around 1900 the distinction between children’s books and adults’ books was much vaguer – everyone read Henty and Alcott (and in the 1970s everyone read Watership Down). With Rowling’s books now issued simultaneously in different covers (and at different prices) for the adult and the children’s market, what was a listmaker to do?

But perhaps most of all, what to do in the face of those figures?

In terms of books, this is the best selling series ever, selling over 500 million copies in more than 70 languages (including, for the first few books, American English). However, should we become over-excited, it is only the third biggest entertainment franchise (after Pokémon and Star Wars, but ahead of James Bond), worth about £25 billion; and the movies – well, only seven of the nine are among the top 50 all-time earners.

J.K. Rowling reads from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at the Easter Egg Roll at White House by Daniel Ogren. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But then, the bestselling children’s book of 2016 in the UK was, of all things, a playscript, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. This sold around 850,000 copies in the UK in its first week – which made it the fastest-selling book since … shall we guess … the all-time fastest seller Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) which had shifted 11 million copies in the USA on its first day, and broke the record set by its predecessor Half-Blood Prince (2005), which broke the record set by its predecessor Order of the Phoenix (2003) which broke … and so on. The Cursed Child, as we might expect, is the biggest-selling playscript of all time, while its production in the West End of London gained a record nine wins in the prestigious 2017 Olivier Awards. For all of this, Ms Rowling has received her just reward: it is estimated that book sales alone brought her £8.3 million in 2015 to add to her fortune of around £600 million.

If some critics have seen Warner Bros’s iron grip on the franchise as exploitative, J.K. Rowling comes across as a hard-working, principled author, with more than her fair share of good sense. One of my favourite stories is that when confronted by a heckler claiming that her books encouraged witchcraft (and they have been widely censored and banned, notably in the USA Bible belt), Ms Rowling paused, and then said, levelly, “You’re mad.”

To some, all of this is merely evidence that popular (and especially adult) taste is going to hell on a broomstick, but the Potter franchise has neither corrupted a generation of child readers, nor revolutionised children’s reading – although it may have helped to hold the line: literacy figures remain stubbornly static.

Similarly, it did not save children’s publishing, which has never been in need of saving. Between 1920 and 1939, in the UK, children’s books accounted for 25% of the book market (by volume); in 2016 the figure was 33%. Even factoring out the direct Harry Potter sales, this is a healthy situation. But it would be idle to deny that Rowling’s books helped to focus publishing minds on the potential of this sector, and the franchises that followed, such as Twilight or The Hunger Games have raised merchandising and commodification techniques to a new level.

The series is undeniably, even unashamedly, derivative: the idea of the school for wizards was not new, and many of the characters are in the English school story tradition. At the centre we have a conventional trio: the flawed and ultimately sacrificial hero; the archetypal comic sidekick; and, the token (clever) female. Where the series surprised the early sceptics was the way in which Harry, Hermione, Ron and the rest inhabit an increasingly ambivalent and uncertain world, riddled with surveillance and dubious truth. If the whole series is ultimately a hero (and female-hero) tale, firmly on the side of goodness and decency, its (generally) happy ending has to be earned and paid for with tragedy. Magic is not easy.

But, after all that, are the Potter books any good? That, of course, depends on what you mean by ‘good’, and one of the refreshing aspects of the Harry Potter affair has been that it has caused a lot of people to re-think (or think about) what they mean by ‘good.’ Thanks to Rowling, many are more aware of the distinctive virtues and characteristics of texts for children, and many prejudices (as well as Death Eaters) have bitten the dust.

Featured image credit: Day 124 – September 13, 2012 Collection of Harry Potter books by Sonia Belviso. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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