Scott Jaschik, "Reprieve for Oral History," IHE, 3 January, reports the most recent developments in the case of Boston College and the Irish Republican Army oral history interviews. See also: "Circuit Breaker," Chris Bray, 30 December.

Gary Rosen, "How to Think About How to Live," WSJ, 27 December, reviews Luc Ferry's A Brief History of Thought.

Michael Patrick Brady for the Boston Globe, 7 November, and Christopher Tyerman, "The Crusaders' Favorite Muslim," WSJ, 31 December, review Anne-Marie Eddé's Saladin.

Richard Eder, "A Romantic Journey Through a Vanished Land," NYT, 28 December, reviews Max Egremont's Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia.

Nicholas Wade, "Genome Study Points to Adaptation in Early African-Americans," NYT, 2 January, features the research of Shanghai's Chinese Academy of Sciences. It identifies genetic mutations in the new world's African Americans.

Carl Rollyson, "A Jewish Revolutionary," WSJ, 31 December, reviews Joshua Rubenstein's Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life.

In Anthony Summers, "The secret life of J. Edgar Hoover," Guardian, 31 December, a Hoover biographer probes J. Edgar's dark depths.

Adam Hochschild, "Haiti's Tragic History," NYT, 29 December, reviews Laurent Dubois' Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.

Joyce E. Chaplin, "Roger Williams: The Great Separationist," NYT, 30 December, reviews John M. Barry's Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. See also: Barry, "God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea," Smithsonian, January.

MelodiousMsM, "The Rule of Thumb: Vagina Types and Variability of Female Orgasm," MoSex:Blog, 18 November, identifies "A. E. Narjani," the author of an important 1924 paper on female orgasm as "Princess Marie Bonapart, great-grandniece of Emperor Napoleon I of France and daughter of Prince Roland Bonaparte." After marrying Prince George of Greece and Denmark in 1907, her official title became Her Royal Highness, Princess George of Greece and Denmark. Experiencing orgasm only through masterbation, HRH exhausted a husband and four male lovers before her study of the distance between the clitoris and the vagina in 243 women as determinative of the possibility of orgasm from penetrative sex.

Gary J. Bass, "How They Learned to Hate the Bomb," NYT, 30 December, reviews Philip Taubman's The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. Lionel Barber for the Financial Times, 18 December, and Jacob Heilbrunn, "Remembering Richard Holbrooke," NYT, 30 December, review Derek Chollet and Samantha Power, eds., The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World.

Finally, congratulations to the winners of Christianity Today's 2012 awards for the best books in history and biography: Paul C. Gutjahr for Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy and Thomas Albert Howard for God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide. Gary Scott Smith won an Award of Merit for Heaven in the American Imagination.

Colin Thubron, "Apocalypse City," NYRB, 12 January, reviews Simon Sebag Montefiori's Jerusalem: The Biography.

"How Luther went viral: Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation," Economist, 17 December, sees precedent for social change.

Mark Lilla, "Republicans for Revolution," NYRB, 12 January, reviews Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

Lyndall Gordon, Eva Hoffman, Calvin Trillin, Jennifer Steil, and William Fiennes recommend the "Best of FiveBooks on Memoirs," The Browser, 26 December. Michael Korda, "Beware Hollywood Memoirs: They're Dull and Overrated," Daily Beast, 27 December, draws on his experience as a publisher to argue that a Hollywood memoir is likely to disappoint.

John Gribbin, "How Physics Got Weird," WSJ, 24 December, reviews Stephen Hawking, ed., The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of, an anthology of the 20th century's major scientific papers that drove the revolution in quantum physics.

Patricia Cohen, "Bound for Local Glory at Last," NYT, 27 December, reports that Oklahoma is finally welcoming the archives of Woodie Guthrie.

At Chris Bray, our former colleague continues his series of posts about the Boston College/Irish Republican Army oral histories controversy. He outlines a convincing case that responsible authorities at Boston College must resign.

Timothy Snyder, "War No More: Why the World Has Become More Peaceful," Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2012, takes up a debate with Steven Pinker.

Tom Shippey, "Arthurian Glories Renewed," WSJ, 24 December, reviews Peter Ackroyd's The Death of King Arthur and Simon Armitage's The Death of King Arthur.

Drew Gilpin Faust, "Much, But Not Everything," The Book, 25 December, reviews David Reynolds's Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.

Matthew Price, "Charles Dickens: a man and his demons," The National, 23 December, reviews Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life. Martin Rubin reviews Rosamund Bartlett's Tolstoy: A Russian Life for the LA Times, 25 December. Thomas Meany, "Stranger in a Strange Land," WSJ, 24 December, reviews Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche.

William Anthony Hay, "Ambition in the East," WSJ, 23 December, reviews Sean McMeekins's The Russian Origins Of the First World War .

Andrew Hartman, "Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders," Jacobin, Winter, takes on our own spoils. See also the discussion at: Hartman, "Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders," US Intellectual History, and anon., "Response," Gates of Mercy, 24 December.

Mary Beard responds to the question, "Do the Classics Have a Future?" NYRB, 12 January.

Adam Kirsch, "Mysteries and Masterpieces," Harvard Magazine, Jan/Feb, investigates "the latest stage in the ‘American conquest of the Middle Ages'."

T. J. Clark, "The Chill of Disillusion," LRB, 5 January, reviews "Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan," the extraordinary exhibit at London's National Gallery. Ken Johnson, "Getting Personal," NYT, 22 December, reviews "The Renaissance Portrait From Donatello to Bellini," an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.

Sam Adams, "Tintin's Father, Nobody's Son," Slate, 22 December, reviews Benoît Peeters' Hergé: Son of Tintin and the comics biography, The Adventures of Hergé.

Jennifer Howard, "Boston College Must Release Oral-History Records, but Court Will Review Them First," CHE, 19 December, and Jack Bouboushian, "Britain May Get Ahold of Secret IRA Interviews," Courthouse News Service, 22 December, report the latest developments in the Boston College/IRA oral history transcripts scandal. Bouboushian's reportage would have been improved had he read Chris Bray's careful study of the court documents here at Cliopatria. Boston College has utterly failed to defend privacy assurances its researchers gave witnesses and will apparently turn over vastly more oral history material than the court has even demanded. Will the American Association of University Professors, the American Historical Association, the American Sociological Association, the Oral History Association, and the Society of American Archivists act to safeguard obvious professional research interests in the case? If not, why not?

Xavier Marquez, "Flattery Inflation," Abandoned Footnotes, 14 December, looks at competitive flattery in tyrannies, ancient and modern.

Allan Mallinson, "Servants To Masters," WSJ, 20 December, reviews Allan Massie's The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family that Shaped Britain. Jonathan Lopez, "A Peaceable Canvas," WSJ, 17 December, reviews Anthony Bailey's Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda.

Barbara Spindel for the Barnes and Noble Review, 30 November, and Ruth Graham, "The Road to the Pill," WSJ, 17 December, review Jean Baker's Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion. Heller McAlpin reviews Alexandra Harris's Virginia Woolf for the Washington Post, 18 December.

Robert Zaretsky, "Dissolution," Tablet, 19 December, reflects on his "life as an accidental Holocaust expert—and why I decided to quit." Owen Matthews, "Haunted By The Gulags' Ghosts," Daily Beast, 19 December, reviews David Satter's It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past.

Or, "The Logical (and Unconstitutional) Conclusion of the Government’s Assertions"

In a decision released on Friday morning (entire document is below; orders are on pg. 48), a federal judge rejected the effort by Boston College to quash subpoenas for confidential oral history materials regarding the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The subpoenaed materials will first go to the court for in camera review, an opportunity for the judge to draw some boundaries around the release of particular portions of the records. But this review seems unlikely to mean very much, for reasons that I'll explain in a few paragraphs.

Start with some cold comfort: During the same week that our morally diseased political class is moving toward the expansion and legal solidification of indefinite military detention, the court said out loud that the executive branch was making an outrageous argument about its own power and its relationship to the judiciary. "This Court is asked to determine what sort of discretion an Article III court has to review or quash a subpoena brought under the authority of the UK-MLAT," Judge William G. Young writes (pp. 1-2). The United States in 2011: We're arguing over whether or not the courts are allowed to review subpoenas, or just have to hand them out when the executive branch says so. Thomas Hutchinson was dignified and restrained in comparison to the governmental creatures of our own moment.

Take a moment to scroll down and look at the long blockquote at the top of pg. 15, which quotes an opinion from the 9th Circuit in another MLAT case; the 9th argued that the executive branch was trying to usurp judicial power, and "convert the judicial branch into a mere functionary." Young finds that the DOJ is up to the same thing again, writing, "this Court wholeheartedly agrees that this is the logical (and unconstitutional) conclusion of the government’s assertions here."

Amazingly enough, the judiciary declines to self-neuter, as if it still wants to be a whole separate branch of government: "This Court holds that a United States District Court has the discretion to review a motion to quash such a subpoena, under the statutory authority conferred by 18 U.S.C. § 3512 and the framework articulated in the UK-MLAT" (pg. 26).

But it's all downhill from there. Most significantly, Young entirely accepts the premise that the subpoenas in question are being pursued as part of a serious criminal investigation, rather than as an act of political theater; nothing in his decision takes note of the fact that the crime being investigated was ignored for forty years by a politicized police agency. See pg. 41, for example (finding that the subpoenas are "relevant to a nonfrivolous criminal inquiry"), or pg. 45: "These are serious allegations and they weigh strongly in favor of disclosing the confidential information."

This acceptance of premises can only have serious effects during Young's in camera review: he does not perceive himself to be examining evidence that is being sought for political reasons and that will have political uses. How many boundaries is he likely to draw?

Young also closes another important door, finding that the courts cannot examine the DOJ's treaty obligation to perform due diligence before executing an MLAT request from a foreign government.  "Unlike the motion to compel, the executive decision that the request is not subject to a specific limitation is not reviewable by this Court," he writes. The DOJ can be all kinds of awful and useless in its consideration of foreign requests, and it's nobody's business but Eric Holder's. The attorney general's diligence is the attorney general's business.

Still, a ray of light shines through one thin opening. Young's decision signals, with flags and banners, that an appeal wouldn't be a bad idea. That's because some issues at hand have never been taken up by the 1st Circuit, the appellate court that includes Massachusetts, and some have never been examined by the courts at all. See the references to matters of "first impression" on pg. 16 and pg. 22.

The likelihood of an appeal, though, depends on a desire to fight on. The unmistakable public silence from Boston College, and the politeness of their arguments before the court, don't inspire much hope. But then, academia as a whole has been almost entirely silent about these subpoenas. That silence, and the indifference it implies, will continue. After all, we're only talking about tearing down the confidentiality of academic research. The mere governments of the world are nowhere near as terrifying and powerful as a real behemoth like the Wisconsin GOP. Academics have a shrewd eye for the really important stuff.

In other news, this will be my last post at Cliopatria. I thank everyone, and especially Ralph Luker, for the years I had a forum here.

Bc Decision

Vernon Bogdanor reviews Peter Conrad's Verdi and/or Wagner: Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries for the New Statesman, 5 December.

Mark Polizzotti, "Patabiographical," bookforum, Dec/Jan, reviews Alastair Brotchie's new biography of the French playwright, Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life.

Franklin Foer, "Macho Pointy-Head," The Book, 30 December, reviews Daniel Ruddy, ed., Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States: His Own Words.

Alec Ash interviews "Rana Mitter on 100 Years of Modern China," The Browser, 13 December, for the Oxford historian's recommendation of five essential books on the subject.

Chet Raymo, "The Secret Life of Heddy Lamarr," Globe and Mail, 9 December, Barbara Spindell for the Barnes and Noble Review, 9 December, and Dwight Garner, "Glamour and Munitions: A Screen Siren's Wartime Ingenuity," NYT, 13 December, review Richard Rhodes's Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr.

Christopher Byrd, "Our Country, Our Critic," Democracy, Winter, reviews Richard M. Cook, ed., Alfred Kazin's Journals.

The introduction to Jeff Swift's "Cascades and the Political Blogosphere," First Monday, 5 December, tracks the growing influence of Aaron Bady's zunguzungu. Aaron won a Cliopatria Award in 2008 for Best Writer and was subsequently one of our colleagues at Cliopatria. His "‘The Grass Is Closed': What I Have Learned About Power from the Police, Chancellor Birgeneau, and Occupy Cal," is a semifinalist for 3 Quarks Daily's Politics and Social Science Prize for 2011.

Mike Dash, "Emperor Wang Mang: China's First Socialist?" Past Imperfect, 9 December, looks at a Chinese emperor who proposed revolutionary reforms, provoked rebellion, and died a terrible death.

Caleb Crain, "iPhone vs. The Police," New Yorker, 7 December, draws on Randolph Roth's American Homicide and Douglas W. Allen's The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World to explain the emergence of police forces in an industrial world.

Ta-Nahisi Coates considers "Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?" Atlantic Monthly, ca 7 December.

Alec Ash interviews "Anna Reid on the Siege of Leningrad," The Browser, 11 December, for her recommendation of five essential books on the subject. Murray Polner reviews Reid's Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 for HNN.

Josh Rothman reviews Jean-Louis Cohen's Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War for Brainiac, 6 December.

Philip Hensher reviews George Craig, et al., eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956 for the Guardian, 9 December.

Barry Gewen, "Isms," The Book, 12 December, reviews Ned O'Gorman's Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy.