I’m sorry to say, but our Records of the Salem Witch Trials (yes, ALL of the legal documents!) won’t be out for a couple more months. It’s a big book, but done right.

We do, however, have a fully unauthorized biography of Satan.

This issue of New York Review of Books reviewed our recently published book Ghosts of War in Vietnam, in which ghost stories abound.

Ooh, we’ve also published a social anthropology of Witchcraft and Sorcery.

Finally, if you must dress like a dead person this weekend, know your stuff. Read A Social History of Dying.

Ruth Wajnryb is WORDS columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald. Her new book, You Know What I Mean? plumbs the depths of language, and the shifty, slippery meanings of our words. Here, a meditation on her own first name.

Although you probably have less reason than some to look up ‘ruth’ in the dictionary, doing so can be a learning experience.

You’ll find it is an archaic common noun meaning ‘pity’, ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’. It derives from the Middle English ‘rue’ (pity), which we still use for the odd curse, as in ‘you’ll rue the day you were born’. Granted, this is not heard a lot these days, probably because in a comparable circumstance we’re more likely to pull out a handgun than invoke the powers of a curse.

These days ‘ruth’ is mostly recognisable in ‘ruthless’. It’s rather sad, don’t you think, to be present only through negation? It wasn’t always so. Remember Biblical Ruth? She who worked the fields by day and spent nights sleeping at the foot of Boaz’s bed, waiting for him to make a move. Which he did, though not before she’d got through a lot of wheat. That story, told to me as a child, has left me grudgingly respectful of the unrapacious Boaz, guided as he was by ethics rather than opportunism.

Now, you will no doubt have noticed my ‘unrapacious’. There’s no such word, of course, but my meaning is pretty transparent, I bet. After all, rapacious is a hit-you-in-the-eye kind of word, and ‘un’ is the conventional semantic reverser. You don’t need a huge imaginative leap to place Boaz closer to the ‘New Man’ end, rather than the Genghis Khan end, of the pillaging and rampaging barometer.

As a reverse marker, ‘un’ is less than totally dependable. We can use it to reverse ‘happy’, ‘cooperative’, ‘lucky’, ‘sure’ and ‘realistic’ (among many more), but not ‘sad’, ‘solemn’, ‘serious’ and ‘savage’ (among others).

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If the real world, at its base, is quantum, then should we not think with quantum logic?

Shahn Majid discusses how the notion of quantum symmetry coming out of modern ideas on space and time could provide clues to the workings of a truly quantum computer.

Have you ever sat through a really boring flow chart presentation and to pass the time found yourself wondering the following: See the way that flow chart arrow crosses that other flow chart arrow:

Does it matter whether the arrow ‘passes under’ the other arrow or ‘jumps over’ it?

If you are an engineer you could ponder the same question for a schematic for the wiring of a computer. In fact you could ponder the question when actually building a computer: does it matter if this wire connecting to that chip jumps over or under this other wire? If you thought it did matter, you would have discovered quantum computers as well as quantum symmetry!

Nice work.

Let me start with the symmetry. Truth, symmetry, beauty! The cornerstones of mathematics, some would argue of the very concept of knowledge. Surely, nothing could be deeper or more self-evident than the notion of symmetry — of finding patterns. But what if our usual conception of symmetry was not quite right? As scientists we should not be afraid to question even the most basic of assumptions. After all, Nature does not know or care what maths is in maths books, and maybe Nature is just a lot more imaginative than anything we have so far thought of.

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Writing for Commentary, Joshua Muravchik reviewed Tim Lynch and Rob Singh’s After Bush in this month’s issue.

The End of the Beginning

After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy

GEORGE W. BUSH has been one of the most reviled of recent Presidents, and he has poll ratings to match. But with the “surge” in Iraq giving signs of having snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, a number of observers have begun to argue that he will be rated more kindly in hindsight than he has been in real time. “There’s more ferment about the Bush legacy than is sometimes acknowledged,” concluded a recent summary in the Washington Post.

Now a book-length presentation of this point has arrived from, of all sources, the groves of British academe, where Bush is hardly more popular than, say, global warming. Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh, both of whom teach at the University of London, couch their defense of Bush in the form of a meditation on what will follow after his administration. Their surprising conclusion: “None of the key elements of the Bush Doctrine . . . will be abandoned in practice by successor administrations, whatever their rhetorical recalibrations and tactical adjustments.”

Why not? Because, Lynch and Singh answer, Bush’s analysis of the challenge we face from Islamic terrorists was basically correct. Like it or not, a “second cold war,” no more of our choosing than the first one, has been thrust upon us. The authors prefer the term “second cold war” to “World War IV”—favored by Norman Podhoretz, R. James Woolsey, and others—because it emphasizes the ideological dimension that, in their judgment, was more in the forefront of our contest with Soviet Communism than it was in World Wars I and II. And much like its predecessor, they write, this second cold war is destined to last for a long time: “Defeating jihadist Islam ultimately requires nothing less than the reform of Islam to separate mosque and state, modernization of Arab and Muslim societies, and steps toward genuine self-government.”

Hence, there is discomfiting news for all those looking forward to January 2009 as the end of the Bush years. That date, observe Lynch and Singh, “marks only the end of the beginning of an epochal struggle.” What is more, they believe they can discern, through the din of reproach directed at Bush, the strains of an incipient national consensus on the matter. This emergent consensus is based on a confluence of factors: the undeniable severity of the threat; the continuance of America’s global primacy; the “appeal of a distinctly American internationalism”; bipartisan support for the war on terror even if not the Iraq war; and the “vitality of American exceptionalism,” in which “values as well as interests have been, and will remain, crucial
components of American policies.”

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Future Imperfect author David Friedman was recently interviewed on KCSB Santa Barbara’s The Marketplace of Ideas.

Have a listen!

Lew McCreary, writing for Harvard Business review, recently commented on Future Imperfect.

We want the world to be orderly, but too often it is simply a mess. Friedman, a law professor, gleefully sorts out a host of messes having to do with a wide range of world-changing technologies. For every manifest benefit (say, reducing crime through universal surveillance), there’s a gnarly negative (adios, privacy). Friedman doesn’t duck the big issues: the death of copyright protection; nanotechnology; cloning, genetic engineering, and other advanced reproductive therapies; cognitive enhancement through pharmacology; the growing difficulty (due in part to tools that allow users to veil their identities) of enforcing contracts in cyberspace.

Friedman is honest enough not to claim to be a seer—the future is both imperfect and uncertain. But he frames the possibilities evenhandedly, with energetic comprehensiveness.