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“Is there any question of who the star is?” Browne asks proudly, watching the video today. For most real estate brokers, a third year as Corcoran’s top producer would have been stardom enough, but when Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman began planning the 2007 event, Browne thought he wouldn’t bother to attend. He’d had enough top-earner, $100-million-club years. He was turning sixty, and he was thinking about his life as a whole. Finally he said he would show up, but only if he could accept the award in drag. Browne’s beloved gay older brother, Roscoe Willett Browne, died of AIDS in 1985. He’d never forget the day when President George H. W. Bush said that dying of AIDS wasn’t as important as losing your job. “George H. W. Bush did not acknowledge the sacrifice of my brother and our love. My brother. He’s in his eighties and he still has his brothers and I don’t have any brothers,” says Browne. “And my brother was a Yalie and he was in Vietnam; Bush, how could he be more your person?” We exist, says Browne, looking at the video of his awards ceremony. “This show says we exist.”

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[caption id="attachment_318721" align="aligncenter" width="492" caption="The affairs of the workers of Eretz Israel should be in the hands of the workers of Eretz Israel, 1935."][/caption]

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– Henry A. Kissinger, 1961

In these words, one of America’s most distinguished strategic thinkers and policy makers expresses alarm at America’s condition and the perils it faces. The warning seems timely, yet it was written more than half a century ago as an assessment of the Soviet threat, problems with allies and the developing world, and in frustration with what the author saw as dangerously inadequate policy and strategic choices. Henry Kissinger was by no means alone. He cited George Kennan’s lament about our domestic failings with race, the cities, the education and environment of our young people, and the gap between expert knowledge and popular understanding, even while criticizing Kennan’s focus on those problems to the exclusion of military and diplomatic threats.

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The Greeks and Romans studied and scrutinized rhetoric so intently because they understood it to be the very stuff of power, specifically the power of persuasion -- which, as Leith points out, is even more potent today than it was in the fourth century BC, when Aristotle produced the first treatise on the subject. The master's "Rhetoric" is a work which (unlike much of his scientific writing) remains as useful today as it did in ancient Athens; Leith sprinkles shrewd tips from it (such as, construct your argument so that your audience thinks it's their own idea) throughout his book. "He was the first person," Leith writes of Aristotle, "really to grasp that the study of rhetoric is the study of humanity itself."

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According to a widely discussed 2010 report by London's Standard Chartered Bank, the world has entered a new "'super-cycle" in which traditional economic hierarchies are being upended. Ever since the financial crisis, the U.S. has lost the economic strength and force of will to be the world's policeman. The number of Americans, for example, who believe the U.S. should "mind its own business internationally" has spiked to a level unseen since the 1950s. Meanwhile, new powers, like China, India and Brazil, have been unwilling to fill the power vacuum the U.S. has left behind. One could argue that this is a nice change from America's aggressive past interventionism, but it has also helped create the global stalemate on everything from global warming to humanitarianism in Syria. And it's a fact that has the potential to radically affect our future, both in positive and negative ways.

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A new exhibition at Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art aims to resurrect the excitement and international flavor of these blockbuster expositions, appealing to nostalgic older generations and curious youngsters alike by celebrating 90 years of beauty and technological innovation in the decorative arts.

Over the phone, curator Catherine Futter explained the show's inspiration, lengthy gestation and throwback structure. Click through the following slide show for a glimpse of the treasures on display.

How did this exhibition come about? How long have you been working on it?

Well, I went to two world's fairs: I went to the 1964 New York World's Fair, and then I went to Expo '67. So my love of world's fairs started when I was very young. And then when I was in graduate school, I wrote a paper about the architecture of the 1867 fair, because it was the first time that there were national pavilions ... Then I worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the '90s, and we started collecting decorative arts that had been shown at world's fairs, and realized that they were sort of the epitome of design, of technological innovation. That got the idea bubbling forward, and then about four years ago, we partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art [in Pittsburgh], and that really got the exhibition going. That's the timeline.

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Martin has always maintained that he's been influenced at least as much by history and historical fiction as by the traditional epic fantasy of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien. Aficionados know that his novels (collectively called "A Song of Ice and Fire") are loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, a vicious series of battles of succession that took place in 15th-century England. Martin has also listed Maurice Druon and Thomas B. Costain as models, two mid-20th-century historical novelists who wrote about medieval France, and you can see echoes of that material in his fictional universe, as well.

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Isaac was her brother. They had parted ways four decades earlier, as the ancient Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt, broke under the strain of economic depression, Arab nationalism, and world war. My grandmother’s family were Sephardic Jews. They took their name, Albel-das, from a Spanish town cleansed of Jews five hundred years ago. From Spain, her ancestors crossed the Mediterranean. Her father hailed from Izmir in what is now Turkey, her mother from the Isle of Rhodes in what is now Greece.

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In his latest book, “To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure,” Henry Petroski, professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University and author, previously, of 17 books on engineering including “The Evolution of Useful Things,” explores how structural failure is affected by cultural and economical limitations. By critically examining the interdependency of people and machines related to bridge collapses, airplane crashes and space shuttle failures, Petroski discovers that understanding failure is the only way to bring successful design and engineering into the future.

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These days, our fears rest not on wariness about that new plant we just came across in the wild, but on fears about what has been done to our food before it reaches our tables. These are the natural result of the growth of a market economy that inserted middlemen between producers and consumers of food. In recent years the ways in which industrialization and globalization have completely transformed how the food we eat is grown, shipped, processed, and sold have helped ratchet up these fears much further.

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That "famous scientist" was a Hungarian émigré mathematician called John von Neumann, and the electronic machine he was developing at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was, of course, the computer, the central product of today's networked society. And it's this story, of von Neumann's attempt to assemble a team of the world's most brilliant 20th-century scientists at IAS, that forms the central narrative in this sparkling new book by one of America's most talented historians of technology.

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"Island of Vice" is Zacks' account of Roosevelt's tenure on New York's police commission during the mid-1890s. As such, it faces a dilemma. The hero of the story is, obviously, TR, that quintessential American, with his boundless energy and can-do spirit, his faith in traditional values and the moral use of violence, his omnivorous mind, his machismo and his naivete. The antagonist is sin-loving New York, Roosevelt's hometown but above all the decadent and narcissistic big city that salt-of-the-earth Americans love to hate. Yet the book's main attraction isn't the glimpse it offers of a larval president or the chance to revel in rural/suburban rectitude. Anyone who settles in with "Island of Vice" will be reading it for the vice.

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On one hand, urban hipsters chugging Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in upscale dives dreamt of working-class authenticity, rebelling against high-class consumerism with aestheticized poverty. On the other hand, segments of the white working class — fans of the comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s self-mocking “You might be a redneck if ...” brand of humor — took tongue-in-cheek pride in the iconography of trailer parks, beer bellies, and kissing cousins meant to stereotype them.

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In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, "Downton Abbey," has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss.  In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford’s "Parade’s End" quartet of novels, and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel "Birdsong" from an NBC-backed production company.

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It was during the last decade, after all, that the belief in the end of the world leapt from the cultish into the mainstream of American society. Ours is an era bookended by the widespread belief in the impending collapse of society: at one end we had Y2K, the largest and most expensive mass preparation for a secular apocalypse in the history of the world; at the other end we have the growing expectation and belief that December 21, 2012 — the supposed end date of the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar — will herald either a radically transformative or utterly cataclysmic global event. Between these two bookends are pages upon pages of apocalyptic anxiety, a decade-plus-long collection that tells the tale of an America that has grown very afraid of the future.

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