The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is a thick fantasy novel with a world map on the first page. It is the author’s first novel, and part one of a yet unpublished trilogy. I ought to hate it. So why do I have the sense that the landscape of fantasy fiction just shifted to make room for a new master? Rothfuss seems to walk into the most overfarmed part of the field with the intention, not to imitate, but to show everyone how to do it right. Out with apocalyptic battles between Good and Evil, out out out with endless braidtugging and plot coupon-chasing Chosen Ones. Tone it all down, down to the most powerful magical incantation of them all: “Once upon a time ..” Now, there’s a man, and there’s a world, and this is the story of his life in that world. It’s as simple as that. I could complain about Kvothe’s unbelievable awesomeness and more, but the fact is that The Name of the Wind brings back memories from when I first read fantasy, of dreams of setting out on the road in a remote world. It feels like home. It feels like sitting by the feet of a storyteller. Thank you, Patrick. I hereby join the hordes of newly converted Rothfussites, waiting with stupid grins for the next two books.

In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells the story of why American conservatives and liberals hate each other. Europeans who sympathize with Democrats see only half the story: American politics is divided into two mutually antagonistic worldviews. And the form this split takes today was born in the 1960’s, when what seemed like a consensus on mainstream liberalism was fractured over race, war, and the counterculture. When this cultural civil war began, Democrats ruled the South and stood firmly behind the war in Vietnam. When the dust had settled, the Democratic party had torn itself apart, and conservative Republicans had risen up on the anger of the white middle class – people who didn’t want to be lectured to by establishment elites, and thought of war protesters as spoiled and cowardly traitors. The anger on display here, the hatred between young and old, is shocking. It’s not just the big acts of violence, it’s the everyday meanness, the sense of desperation, the sense that the other side will destroy the nation. Perlstein is a liberal and it shows, but he’s too young to have a personal stake in the 60’s, and too honest to make this a morality play. All sides are portrayed in ugly detail, and in some amoral sense Richard Nixon himself comes out of it the most sympathetic. He’s a dangerous crook, but he understands the voters, and boldly surfs their new anxieties to the White House. Like Nixon, Nixonland is mean and ugly and sadly relevant, (yes even to Norwegian politics).

“I still think we ought to take the dikes out now,” Nixon offered. “I think – will that drown people?”

“Zhat will drown about two hundred thousand people.”

“Oh, well, no, no. I’d rather use a nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?”

“Zhat, I think, would be too much. Too much.”

“The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ’s sakes!”

Kissinger paused, taken aback. He collected himself, eventually responding with the one thing he knew would talk the president down from his flight of fantasy: “I think we’re going to make it.” Until Election Day, he probably meant; Saigon would hold on at least until then.

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

Steven LeVine talks about the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist.

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Philip Pan talks about freedom and repression in China.

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Frank Wilczek explains the Large Hadron Collider. And there’s a silly LHC rap. Physics nerds are so awesome.

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“Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes, or barefooted deserves to be shot,” a Kent resident told a researcher.

“Do I have your permission to quote that?”

“You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning.”

“But you had three sons there.”

“If they didn’t do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down.”

A letter to Life later that summer read, “It was a valuable object lesson to homegrown advocates of anarchy and revolution, regardless of age.”

Time had called the Silent Majority “not so much shrill as perplexed,” possessed of “a civics-book sense of decency.” Pity poor Time, whose America was but a memory.

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

At Northwestern, students carried a flag upside down, the symbol for distress. “A hefty man in work clothes,” according to Time, tried to grab it, saying, “That’s my flag! I fought for it! You have no right to it!” The kids started arguing. “There are millions of people like me,” he responded. “We’re fed up with your movement. You’re forcing us into it. We’ll have to kill you. All I can see is a lot of kids blowing a chance I never had.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

Jesse Venbrux makes strange little computer games and gives them away for free. Go have fun:

• Karoshi – Where the object on each level is to find a way to kill yourself.
• Mubbly Tower – Where you construct a tower and must keep it standing while defending against shiny happy enemies with your own shiny happy defenders.
• Execution – Where you execute a prisoner. Yes.
• Paperblast – A shooter where you don’t control the shooting.

And much more.

“The president dictated eight memos outlining a public relations push-back. It was part of the foreign policy game. De-escalation was contingent on [North Vietnam] believing Nixon would escalate; which was contingent upon keeping presidential approval ratings high; which was contingent on the appearance of de-escalation. As one of the big syndicated columnists, Roscoe Drummond, observed, only grasping one-tenth of the complexity, unless Vietnam looked to be winding down, ‘popular opinion will roll over him as it did LBJ.’ At which Nixon thundered upon his printed news summary, ‘E&K – Tell him that RN is less affected by press criticism and opinion than any Pres in recent memory.’ Because he was the president most affected by press criticism and opinion of any president in recent memory. Which if known would make him look weak. And any escalatory bluff would be impossible. Which would keep him from credibility as a de-escalator; which would block his credibility as an escalator; which would stymie his ability to de-escalate; and then he couldn’t ‘win’ Vietnam – which in his heart he didn’t believe was possible anyway.

Through the looking glass with Richard Nixon: this stuff was better than LSD.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“[NBC producer Lew Koch] was inordinately proud of what they’d produced – 1968’s version of Bull Connor’s fire hoses: glorious moral theater, naked evil being visited upon innocents. He repaired to NBC headquarters at the Merchandise Mart after that first broadcast filled with self-satisfaction. A sympathizer with the antiwar movement, he thought he had advanced their cause considerably. The assignment editor asked him to help with the phones; the switchboard was overwhelmed.

The first call: ‘I saw those cops beating the kids – right on for the cops!’

Another: ‘You fucking commies!’ He was referring to NBC – as if they had instigated the riots.

The calls kept coming, dozens. They came to all the networks, for days upon days. Some people saw noble cops innocently defending themselves. Others accused the networks of hiring cops to beat up kids to spice up the show. Lew Koch was so shaken by the experience, he left for a soul-searching six-month leave of absence.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“Godfrey Hodgson wrote of the media about-face: ‘They had been united, as rarely before, by their anger at Mayor Daley. Now they learned that the great majority of Americans sided with Daley, and against them. It was not only the humiliation of discovering that they had been wrong; there was also alarm at the discovery of their new unpopularity. Bosses and cops, everyone knew, were hated; it seemed that newspapers and television were hated even more.'”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“Chicago cops had been angry for years. In 1960, after a corruption scandal, they had inherited a new police superintendent, Orlando W. Wilson, who was a college professor, one of the founders of the academic discipline of criminal justice. They saw him as an ivory-tower puritan, obsessed with showing arrests for the kind of ‘victimless’ crimes – drinking, whoring, gambling – by which cops from time immemorial had padded their weekly pay envelopes by looking the other way. [..] They hated him for his policy of replacing retiring white commanders with Negroes (40 percent of new sergeants were black his first year); in one survey, two-thirds of Chicago cops called themselves racists. These cops hated him most especially for holding them back from busting ‘civil rights’ troublemakers. During the riots in 1966, ten thousand officers working twelve-hour patrols felt as if they were hardly allowed to arrest anyone. Sixty-four quit that June alone, thirty-seven before they were eligible for pensions.

Wilson quit in 1967. His successor continued his policies. One of his first acts had been to shut down a Ku Klux Klan cell operating within the force, with its own arsenal of firearms and hand grenades.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“The pundits said [Robert] Kennedy was a uniter. The facts showed he was a divider. But to an Establishment hungry beyond measure for signs of consensus, the myth answered a psychic need. Moderates can be seized by ideological fever dreams as much as extremists; it has always been thus.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“On Januar 31, 1967, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, flanked by eight security guards, briefed some one hundred student-government presidents and campus-newspaper editors who had signed a letter questioning the war: football players, fraternity presidents, mainstream kids, stunned into silence by the obvious lies their secretary of state expected them to believe.

A kid from Michigan State: ‘Mr. Secretary, what happens if we continue the policy you’ve outlined … this continued gradual escalation until the other side capitulates … up to and including nuclear war, and the other side doesn’t capitulate?’

Rusk leaned back, hissed forth a stream of tobacco smoke, and solemnly replied, ‘Well, somebody’s going to get hurt.’

Here, before their eyes, was the maniacal air force general Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove. The room drew silent, their thoughts as one: My God, the secretary of state is crazy.

The madness was not hard to spot, if you chose to spot it. The problem was facing the wrath of all those decent Americans who didn’t want to face that their government was mad.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“Hangers-on urged [George] Romney to run in the open to build his national following and prove his grasp of the issues. His statehouse aides cringed: they knew the last thing that would help their boss was to rehearse in public. He was too damned forthright, too earnest – especially about Vietnam. He grappled with it honestly. Which would make what he said sound absurd, since everyone else was in denial or lying.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland