Forgetting Why We Remember

By DAVID W. BLIGHT

New York Times, Published: May 29, 2011

"MOST Americans know that Memorial Day is about honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a holiday devoted to department store sales, half-marathons, picnics, baseball and auto racing. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?

 

At the end of the Civil War, Americans faced a formidable challenge: how to memorialize 625,000 dead soldiers, Northern and Southern. As Walt Whitman mused, it was “the dead, the dead, the dead — our dead — or South or North, ours all” that preoccupied the country. After all, if the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, four million names would be on the Vietnam...

 Journalist, firefighter, and author of HIGH CRIMES, Michael Kodas's MEGAFIRE, an exploration of the new global phenomenon of megafires, forest fires of alarming scale, intensity, and devastation, through the story of one of the worst years for forest fires in the past century, to Susan Canavan at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, by Wendy Strothman at The Strothman Agency (World English).

 Watch Walter Lewin's last physics lecture here! 

"Of all the souls made famous by YouTube — Justin Bieber, those wedding entrance dancers, that guy who loses his mind while videotaping a double-rainbow — none is more deserving than MIT physics professor Walter Lewin. Lewin taught introductory physics at the university for more than three decades, and his lectures were intense, elegant, and perfectly orchestrated tributes to the harmonies of the physical world.

 

Lewin is 6 feet 2, silver-haired, and...

 Psychology Today: 

Amy Ellis Nutt Reads from Shadows Bright As Glass

Energy Deja Vu: Obama Must Break with Failed U.S. Policies

 

By Michael Graetz, Yale Environment 360

by Michael Graetz

Despite soaring rhetoric and some promising proposals, President Obama is repeating the same mistakes that have doomed U.S. energy policy to failure for 40 years. Until Obama and Congress finally put a true price on the fossil fuels America consumes, the U.S. will continue its addiction to foreign oil and domestic coal.

 The weekend following President Obama's energy policy speech on March 30 and the White House's simultaneous release of its "Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future," many newspapers ran a cartoon by Jeff Stahler depicting the eight presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, each supplying one word of the refrain: "We must...

The Platform: Good Reviews Are No Longer Enough