As a film buff, I was keen to see Steve Walt's top ten list of "movies that tells us something about international relations more broadly."

Someone once said that the only proper way to critique a film is by making another film. Following that logic, I think the only way to critique Steve's list is to make my own.

Using Steve's criteria, the overlap between our top ten list is pretty small: Dr. Strangelove and Casablanca. It's not that I hate the other films -- I just think there are better, more entertaining movies out there that highlight some interesting aspects of world politics. Here are eight other films I think are essential watching for international relations junkies: 

8. Burnt By the Sun (1994)

The tension in Nikita Mikhailkov's film comes from the juxtaposition of the terror that comes from living in a totalitarian society and the beauty on screen that comes from a family vacation in the Russian countryside.   

7. Seven Days in May (1964)

This Rod Serling-scripted, John Frankenheimer-directed movie is the film to watch when musing about civil-military relations, particularly in the United States. 

6. Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

Buried within this romp about two Mexican teenagers going on a road trip with a very attractive woman is a lot of subtext about the ways in which globalization has affected Mexico.  I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but director Alfonso Cuarón is quite deft in making his points without banging you on the head repeatedly to do it.

5. Conspiracy (2001) 

Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil." This movie -- a real-time recreation of the 1942 Wansee Conference -- is the best evocation of Arendt's theme. Plus, any movie where Colin Firth plays a Nazi is guaranteed to shock. 

4. The Americanization of Emily (1964)

An absurdist tale about bureaucratic politics and public relations during wartime. James Garner was the perfect actor to play the protagonist.  Possibly the only movie ever made to extol cowardice as a virtue.  

3. The Day After (1983)

An ABC television movie that sparked a great deal of controversy when it aired during one of the peaks of Cold War tensions. It's far from a perfect film -- I mean, c'mon, Steve Guttenberg is in it -- but I actually prefer it to Dr. Strangelove on one important dimension. It does a much better job than Kubrick's film at evoking the latent dread that people felt during the Cold War about the possibility of global thermonuclear war. I'm glad this dread has largely disappeared from global consciousness, but there's a part of me that wants younger generations to see this movie periodically just to remember what it feels like. 

2. Children of Men (2007)

No top ten list about IR films is complete without a good dystopia flick. The premise (global infertility) is a bit of a stretch, but if you accept that, the rest of the movie seems like an effortless, logical extension of how civilization would respond to such a pandemic. Also directed by Alfonso Cuarón, incidentally. The action sequences are jaw-dropping.   

1. The Lion in Winter (1967)

How do you make a movie about the strengths and limits of rational choice in international politics? It helps if you have Peter O'Toole, Katherine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, and Timothy Dalton, and biting dialogue.

OK, readers, which flicks did I miss? 

classicmoviegals/Flickr

I'm attending a conference on YouTube and the 2008 Election.  This being a tech-friendly conference, the organizers have courteously placed plugs under the tables for people to plug in their laptops. 

What's odd about this is the number of people dressed in business clothes crawling under tables to plug in or plug out of the sockets.  It looks perfectly normal now, but perhaps a decade ago one would have looked askance at someone ducking under such a table. 

Similarly, I lived in the South Side of Chicago when the handless cell phone got hot.  Before its use, there already were a number of people talking out loud to no one around them.  After its use, it was difficult at times to distinguish between the tech crowd and the... differently mentally abled crowd. 

There should be a name for technological innovations that make what appears to be abnormal behavior normal.  Readers are requested to:

1. Come up with other examples of this kind of phenomenon;
2. Name it.

Go!!

To explain how dire the economic situation is right now, one could mention General Motors, or bring up General Electric, or, hey, there's always the latest jobs report. 

The following tidbit of information, however, suggests how serious things really are:

• Based on data obtained from dinner chit-chat painstakingly gathered throughout the day, it appears that Thomas Friedman's speaking fees have recently fallen by 25%.

Of course, this could be because his speaker profile is a bit out of date. 

I don't have any big thoughts about yesterday's dramatic water landing and safe rescue of everyone aboard USAir flight 1549.  Of course, I do have two not-so-big thoughts: 

First, as this USA Today story makes clear, what makes this event particularly unusual is the increasing safety of air travel: 

For the first time since the dawn of the jet age, two consecutive years passed — 2007 and 2008 — without a single passenger death on a scheduled airline flight carrying 10 or more seats, according to USA TODAY research of government and industry data. During those two years, airlines carried about 1.5 billion passengers.

That's pretty miraculous as well.

Second, despite this safety record, Michelle Maynard of the New York Times chronicles the persistent menace that birds pose to jetliners: 

Since 2000, at least 486 planes have collided with birds, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Of those incidents, 166 led to emergency landings and 66 resulted in aborted takeoffs.

The earliest known fatal airplane crash involving a bird took place in 1912, nine years after the first flight by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C. That plane crashed into the surf off Long Beach, Calif., pinning its pilot under the wreckage

While most birds probably wish to peacefully coexist with humans, it is becoming increasingly clear that a small group of radicalized avians are hell-bent on destroying our way of life.  These radical birdists hate us for our freedom.  This can not stand. 

I, for one, look forward to President Bush's declaration of a War on Birds.  Unfortunately, this will last only four days, after which President Obama will no doubt appoint this guy as special envoy to the avian community. 

Last week I blogged about an study conducted by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences suggesting that book-reading declined between the early 1990s and the early 2000s. 

Well, good news, the National Endowment of the Arts released their own study today, and it suggests that this trend has been reversed: 

For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts...

"At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable."

Among the highlights of the study: 

• Young adults show the most rapid increases in literary reading. Since 2002, 18-24 year olds have seen the biggest increase (nine percent) in literary reading, and the most rapid rate of increase (21 percent). This jump reversed a 20 percent rate of decline in the 2002 survey, the steepest rate of decline since the NEA survey began.
• Since 2002, reading has increased at the sharpest rate (+20 percent) among Hispanic Americans, Reading rates have increased among African Americans by 15 percent, and among Whites at an eight percent rate of increase.
• For the first time in the survey's history, literary reading has increased among both men and women. Literary reading rates have grown or held steady for adults of all education levels.
• Fiction (novels and short stories) accounts for the new growth in adult literary readers.
• Online readers also report reading books. Eighty-four percent of adults who read literature (fiction, poetry, or drama) on or downloaded from the Internet also read books, whether print or online.

So maybe Oprah and Harry Potter are having an effect after all. 

UPDATE:  Here's a link to the actual report (.pdf).

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has developed a Humanities Indicator prototype to track the state of the arts and humanities over time and compared to other countries. The inspiration appears to be the National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators. 

Some of the more interesting findings from their press release:

• Among Western industrialized nations, the United States ranks near the top in the percentage of highly literate adults (21%) but also near the top in the proportion who are functionally illiterate (also 21%).
• Since the early 1970s, the number of Americans who support the banning of books from the public library because they espouse atheism, extreme militarism, communism, or homosexuality decreased by at least 11 percentage points. 26% of the public would support banning some type of book. In the case of books advocating homosexuality, the decline was 20 percentage points.
• The number of American adults who read at least one book in the previous 12 months decreased from 61% to 57% in the decade between the early 1990s and the early 2000s. The greatest rate of decline (approximately 15%) occurred among 18-to-24-year-olds.

That last data point provides a nice cautionary note about the dangers of extrapolating from pop culture trends. Given that the early part of this decade was the peak of the Oprah Book Club and the Harry Potter frenzy, I would have guessed a different trend line. 

Christopher Beam has an entertaining story in Slate about the various backroom machinations TV bookers must undergo in order to get the right set of talking heads.  

There are some guests who simply refuse to go on the air with other particular people or with anyone at all. Likewise, there are some people who no one else wants to appear with. It's rarely discussed, because the bookers who mediate these ego wars are bound by contract—and their own interests—to keep quiet. And hosts rarely mention the snubs on-air, since they want guests to come back. But snubbing happens all the time, and conversations with bookers, producers, and guests reveal that some divas are especially notorious.

This part stood out for me: 

The biggest offenders are usually the ones whose egos are too big to accommodate any company: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Haig, and others who figure they have better uses for their time than debating some flack on the air. "They would only go on if they could do the show alone," says a former producer for Crossfire. "Brzezinski won't debase his cable currency by being a two-box," explained a current booker, referring to the practice of displaying guests on a split screen. Another booker cited Brzezinski's refusal to go on with Pat Buchanan—"probably because he thinks he's an anti-Semite." (An assistant to Brzezinski says: "It isn't true that he will only appear alone. He has appeared many, many times with other guests." Maybe so. But bookers say he doesn't do so willingly.)

Here's a piece of advice to TV bookers -- surprise these mooseheads with another guest just before they're going to go on.  Why?  Because, in my experience, when mooseheads at the Kissinger-Brzezinski level are alllowed to pontificate at will, they are unbelievably boring and rote.  On the other hand, they are at their best precisely when they are challenged by someone.  Maybe they get riled up at having their authority questioned, or maybe they want to smack down the young whippersnapper tring to unseat the Pundit King.  All I know is, when they are poked and prodded, the analytical sharpness that got them to their exalted position comes out, and then the fun starts.  I've seen this in person -- but Josh Marshall David Kurtz captures an example of this on video.  Zbigniew Brzezinski doesn't like it when he's challenged on the Middle East -- watch what happens: 

 

Oh, and it makes for good TV -- though in this case it has the added frisson of Mika Brzezinski's uncomfortable body language. 

That line from The Simpsons came to my mind when I read this Financial Times essay by Jonathan Guthrie: 

If you can fake authenticity in the new year, you will have it made. Authenticity was already a buzzword in business and politics before the credit crunch. It will become an essential virtue following the curtain twitch that revealed so many Masters of the Universe to be Wizards of Oz. At one executive leadership seminar I attended recently, the trainer explained that authenticity was the main attribute delegates needed to radiate, including “different types of authenticity for different audiences”. This means being a technocrat in the boardroom, a pragmatist among middle managers and an Average Joe on the shop floor.

One does wonder if this increases the likelihood of bloggers -- who were in on the ground floor of this whole "constructed authenticity" deal -- making it in the corporate world. 

If you had asked me to come up, in my head, with the perfect embodiment of a rabbi, I would have thought of Arnold Wolf.  He was the rabbi emeritus at KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue in Hyde Park, and one of the most interesting individuals I have ever met.  As reporters began covering Hyde Park during the Obama campaign, they found Wolf worth quoting at length. Rabbi Wolf was always able to combine his formidable erudition with a genuine curiosity about the opinions of other people, making him the perfect rabbi for the university community of Hyde Park.  He flattered me as an early reader of this blog.  Some of the my most pleasant interactions in Chicago were random encounters with him on the street.  He simultaneously rekindled my interest in Judaism and ruined me for other rabbis.   Earlier this week, Arnold Wolf passed away.  The Chicago Tribune has his obituary.  He will be missed.  UPDATE:  President-elect Obama issued a statement on Rabbi Wolf's passing: 

I am deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, who was not just our neighbor, but a dear friend to Michelle and me. We are joined in this time of grief by the entire Hyde Park community, the American Jewish Community, and all those who shared Rabbi Wolf's passion for learning and profound commitment to serving others. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. Throughout Chicago and in Jewish homes and classrooms across our country, Rabbi Wolf's name is synonymous with service, social action and the possibility of change. He will be remembered as a loving husband and father, an engaging teacher, a kindhearted shepherd for the K.A.M. Isaiah community, and a tireless advocate of peace for the United States, Israel and the world.

Following up on my last post, a good source of comedy reading this holiday season will be the various prognostications and predictions made in the past year that now seem foolish.  One could blame the prognosticators for being fools, and in some cases that's true.  In other instances, however, it's just what people see as rational extrapolation from the past.  Just to pick an example out of a hat, here's what the McKinsey Global Institute wrote in June of this year: 

Four new power brokers—Asian sovereign investors, petrodollars, hedge funds, and private equity firms—are having a growing impact on global capital markets. In this update to a 2007 report, MGI examines how the new power brokers have fared since then, during the turmoil of skyrocketing oil prices, evaporating liquidity, and disappearing leverage.

MGI finds that the financial and economic events since mid-2007 have, if anything, accelerated the trends identified earlier: The power brokers' wealth and clout have grown. They have adapted by expanding their investment strategies. And they have increased the use of private financing as an alternative to public markets. Their actions have brought clear benefits in containing the financial market crisis but also have highlighted the risks associated with their rise....

Despite the financial crisis, MGI projects that the power brokers will continue to grow in wealth and clout. Under a conservative, base–case scenario, their combined assets will grow to $21 trillion (excluding overlap between them) by 2013. If, instead, they grow more briskly, at their 2000 to 2007 pace, their wealth would rise to $31 trillion, equivalent to roughly 60 percent the expected size of global pension funds or mutual funds in 2013.

The rapid rise of the new power brokers also poses potential risks. The report examines four main concerns: that the additional liquidity might foster asset price inflation; that state investors might use their wealth for political purposes; that hedge fund failures might destabilize the financial system; and that private equity firms' heavy leverage might increase credit defaults. MGI concludes these concerns remain on the table and justify careful consideration and monitoring. But overall, the rise of these new power brokers has been largely beneficial to global capital markets.

The possibility of hedge funds destabilizing the system certainly remains in play, but most of the rest of this looks pretty silly.  Of MGI's four new power brokers, only Asian sovereign investors still look like their power will be growing. 

I really don't mean to pick on McKinsey.  In fact, readers are strongly encouraged to comb through the archives of danieldrezner.com to see what I got wrong.  Here's my prediction post from the end of last year -- I only batted .500, but I do think I got the big things right. 

Roger Cohen's column in the New York Times today begs for an old time fisking.  So here goes: 

Since visiting Cuba a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about the visual assault on our lives. Climb in a New York taxi these days and a TV comes on with its bombardment of news and ads. It’s become passé to gaze out the window, watch the sunlight on a wall, a child’s smile, the city breathing. In Havana, I’d spend long hours contemplating a single street. Nothing — not a brand, an advertisement or a neon sign — distracted me from the city’s sunlit surrender to time passing. At a colossal price, Fidel Castro’s pursuit of socialism has forged a unique aesthetic, freed from agitation, caught in a haunting equilibrium of stillness and decay. Such empty spaces, away from the assault of marketing, beyond every form of message (e-mail, text, twitter), erode in the modern world, to the point that silence provokes a why-am-I-not-in-demand anxiety. Technology induces ever more subtle forms of addiction, to products, but also to agitation itself. The global mall reproduces itself, its bright and air-conditioned sterility extinguishing every distinctive germ.

OK, first of all, Roger Cohen has never ridden in a NYC cab with small children -- because those little TVs are godsends when traveling with little ones who might ordinarily get carsick being in a real New York cab. Now, as it happens, I have also spent significant amounts of time in empty spaces as well.  And while the aesthetic along certain boulevards of an absence of advertising and neon can be lovely, the fact is that 90% of these places would really benefit from some of the global mall.  Paris has its charms, but the rest of the world is not Paris.  Having lived in Donetsk, Ukraine fore a year, I kept thinking, "at least some advertising would bring a little color to a drab part of the globe."  So, no, I didn't feel a "why-am-I-not-in-demand anxiety" when I was in these places -- I felt bored. 

Paris, of course, has resisted homogenization. It’s still Paris, with its strong Haussmannian arteries, its parks of satisfying geometry, its islands pointing their prows toward the solemn bridges, its gilt and gravel, its zinc-roofed maids’ rooms arrayed atop the city as if deposited by some magician who stole in at night. It’s still a place where temptation exists only to be yielded to and where time stops to guard forever an image in the heart. All young lovers should have a row in the Tuileries in order to make up on the Pont Neuf. Yet, for all its enduring seductiveness, Paris has ceased to be the city that I knew. The modern world has sucked out some essence, leaving a film-set perfection hollowed out behind the five-story facades. The past has been anaesthetized. It has been packaged. It now seems less a part of the city’s fabric than it is a kitschy gimmick as easily reproduced as a Lautrec poster. I know, in middle age the business of life is less about doing things for the first than for the last time. It is easy to feel a twinge of regret. Those briny oysters, the glistening mackerel on their bed of ice at the Rue Mouffetard, the drowsy emptied city in August, the unctuousness of a Beef Bourguignon: these things can be experienced for the first time only once. So what I experience in Paris is less what is before me than the memory it provokes of the city in 1975. Memories, as Apollinaire noted, are like the sound of hunters’ horns fading in the wind. Still, they linger. The town looks much the same, if prettified. What has changed has changed from within.

What I love about this section is the 100% certainty that, fifty years from now, some op-ed columnist will write an essay containing the exact same nostalgia about the anaesthetized, packaged Paris of today.  Similarly, fifty years ago I guarantee you someone wrote this exact same essay, complaining that the Paris of Roger Cohen's fond remembrance is merely an anaesthetized, packaged version of the "true" Paris.  This section is not about Paris changing -- it's about Roger Cohen aging (which, to his credit, he kind of understands).

At dinner with people I’d known back then, I was grappling with this elusive feeling when my friend lit a match. It was a Russian match acquired in Belgrade and so did not conform to current European Union nanny-state standards. The flame jumped. The sulfur whiff was pungent. A real match! Then it came to me: what Paris had lost to modernity was its pungency. Gone was the acrid Gitane-Gauloise pall of any self-respecting café. Gone was the garlic whiff of the early-morning Metro to the Place d’Italie. Gone were the mineral mid-morning Sauvignons Blancs downed bar-side by red-eyed men. Gone were the horse butchers and the tripe restaurants in the 12th arrondissement. Gone (replaced by bad English) was the laconic snarl of Parisian greeting. Gone were the bad teeth, the yellowing moustaches, the hammering of artisans, the middle-aged prostitutes in doorways, the seat-less toilets on the stairs, and an entire group of people called the working class. Gone, in short, was Paris in the glory of its squalor, in the time before anyone thought a Frenchman would accept a sandwich for lunch, or decreed that the great unwashed should inhabit the distant suburbs. The city has been sanitized.

I've visited parts of the global that have been sanitized and parts of the globe that have not.  I vote for sanitation.  For every charming pungent aroma that Cohen claims has disappeared, there are five aromas that I'm happy to see diminish in scope:  no one misses the pungency of stale urine, vomit, moldy beer, rotting garbage, and worse smells, but they tend to parallel the ones Cohen claims to miss.  I'll take that tradeoff without blinking.  And, apparently, so will the rest of Europe.

But squalor connects. When you clean, when you favor hermetic sealing in the name of safety, you also disconnect people from one another. When on top of that you add layers of solipsistic technology, the isolation intensifies. In its preserved Gallic disguise, Paris is today no less a globalized city than New York.

Likely true, and if Cohen wants to bemoan the cultural cost of globalization, I'm not so blinkered as to suggest it doesn't exist.  But I'll trade the minor cost to Paris for the massive culinary benefit that globalization has had on other metropolises, like, say, London. 

Havana has also preserved its architecture — the wrought-iron balconies, the caryatids, the baroque flourishes — even if it is crumbling. What has been preserved with it, thanks to socialist economic disaster, is that very pungent texture Paris has lost to modernity. The slugs of Havana Club rum in bars lit by fluorescent light, the dominos banged on street tables, the raucous conversations in high doorways, the whiff of puros, the beat through bad speakers of drums and maracas, the idle sensuality of Blackberry-free days: Cuba took me back decades to an era when time did not always demand to be put to use.

For Pete's sake, you can go lots of island resorts without a Stalinist economy and still experience that kind of slowing down.  Hell, there are even, dare I say, commercials that make this point. 

I thought I’d always have Paris. But Havana helped me see, by the flare of a Russian match, that mine is gone.

I've visited a lot of communist locales that preserve Cohen's pungency.  As a general rule, all of them are better off after the pungency has gone. 

Thankfully, you don't see the phrase "Hobbesian frenzy" all that often in newspaper prose.  The International Herald-Tribune's Jack Healy and Angela Macropoulos manage to get it into their lead paragraph, for very regrettable reasons: 

A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York was trampled to death by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy. At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York, Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee who had been waiting with other workers in the store's entryway. People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid the man. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

Let's hope that Healy and Macropoulos find a story where they manage to use the phrase "Kantian bliss" appopriately. Readers are encouraged to write their own lead paragraph for a story that involves their favorite philosophical concept -- Lockean civility, Nietzschean absurdity, Machiavellian lust, etc.   

Yeah, yeah, there's another government bailout of a bank and Barack Obama is unfurling his economic team and policy proposals.  Can we get to the important stuff?  Like, the sexiest movie ever?  Entertainment Weekly, as is their wont, has come up with their list of the 50 sexiest movies of all time, and gee, the list suck eggs.  The fact that 300 is on the list at all is the first tipoff that something is wrong  [But that one is for the gays!!--ed.  Oh, for Pete's sake, then put Top Gun on the list -- that flick has way more homoeroticism than 300.]    More importantly, I refuse to live in a world in which Mr. & Mrs. Smith is declared to the the third sexiest movie of all time.  Call me old, old school, but a list like this that has no Bogart-Bacall films, no Tracy-Hepburn movies, no Bringing Up Baby, no Thomas Crown Affair (either version), only one Susan Sarandon movie, etc., then the list is pretty piss-poor.  It does get one thing right, however.  This is a pretty sexy scene: 

 

Readers are encouraged to improve upon Entertainment Weekly and discuss which sexy movies were thoughtlessly omitted from the list. 

For The World in 2009, the Economist tackles the question of public intellectuals.  The essay closes by underscoring a point I made in my "Public Intellectials 2.0" essay -- um, but it's going to be a bit awkward for me to cite: 

The top tier of public intellectuals has come to speak mainly through upmarket news media such as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the New York Review of Books and the BBC. But the rise of blogs has greatly enlarged and confused the market. A disparager would say that anybody can be a blogger, and anything can be a blog: is this not proof of low standards? And yet, top bloggers include academics and commentators whose work would qualify them as public intellectuals by any traditional measure—for example, Tyler Cowen, Daniel Drezner, James Fallows, Steven Levitt, Lawrence Lessig and Andrew Sullivan. Indeed, it seems fair to say that if you have the quick wit and the pithy turn of phrase traditionally needed to succeed as a public intellectual, then you are one of nature’s bloggers. If you cannot quite imagine Berlin posting to Twitter, then think how well he would put, say, Hannah Arendt in her place, on bloggingheads.tv.... Whatever their provenance, the public intellectuals of 2009 will want to be fluent in the obvious issues of the moment: environment and energy, market turmoil, China, Russia, Islam. On that basis it looks like another good year for established stars such as Thomas Friedman, Martin Wolf, Bjorn Lomborg and Minxin Pei. But a rising generation of bloggers is terrifyingly young and bright: expect to hear more from Ezra Klein, Megan McArdle, Will Wilkinson and Matthew Yglesias.

Of course, the really funny thing about this is that Klein, McArdle, Wilkinson and Yglesias all dwarf my traffic flows.