Harrison’s condition, much to the crowd’s glee, consisted of being “partly strangled, disemboweled, castrated, and shown his organs being burned before being decapitated.” Pepys wasn’t particularly offended by the proceedings, seeing that his next move was to take a few friends to the local tavern for some oysters. But to modern readers, the crowd’s giddy reaction would be universally condemned as inhumane and unimaginably cruel.

Such differences in reaction hint that we are less violent than our extreme torture-tolerant ancestors. But to those who dismiss such differences and point to the unparalleled carnage of the 20th century, Harvard psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker has a startling and controversial declaration: You have been deceived. Armed with statistics, studies, and – his greatest strength – stories, Pinker asserts in Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined that we currently enjoy the good fortune of living in the most peaceable era of our species’ existence.

Pinker’s painstaking quest to prove such a debatable thesis spans 800 pages, but such length is unavoidable. Pinker is well aware that the majority of the general public disagrees with him. Converting these nonbelievers is a Herculean task – but one in which he succeeds, crafting a monumental and successful work that intertwines both history and psychology to create a valuable message.

A Foreign Country Called the Past

Better Angels of Our Nature encapsulates so many developments in human history that it would have been overwhelming without Pinker’s meticulous categorization. He calls his book “a tale of six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces,” and it is these six trends that comprise the bulk of the book and are the most essential. They begin with the dramatic decline of violence associated with humanity’s early transition from anarchy to agricultural civilizations – dubbed the “Pacification Process” – and end with the present-day “Rights Revolutions” of civil and animal rights. The latter are so farther down on the totem pole of violence that it’s easy to see how far humanity has progressed. Where the world once had chronic carnage-filled raiding and a fivefold higher rate of violent death, we now have Switzerland’s 150 pages of regulation dictating how to be a proper dog owner.

Throughout these thousands of years of history, Pinker manages to include multipage synopses of every violence-related issue to fortify his thesis: homophobia, racism, religion, misogyny, human sacrifice, animal rights, terrorism, sadism, empathy, anarchy, torture, dueling, honor, and the Enlightenment, to name just a few of the many. And throughout all these topics, Pinker’s skillful storytelling is ultimately what keeps his audience engrossed – not only by succinctly describing harrowing anecdotes, but also by picking the right ones to describe in the first place.

He is especially successful in dispelling our ironic nostalgia for the good old times, the days of chivalry and biblical altruism. But Pinker’s stories, usually no longer than a paragraph or two, reveal a past in which people not only tolerated torture, but also reveled in it. The graphic descriptions infused throughout the book – especially those about torture devices, of which Christian Europeans were evidently very creative producers – exist for more than shock value. In what Pinker calls “the foreign country called the past,” it is all too easy and common to overlook the rampant violence. Pinker forces us to remember.

Pinker’s sense of humor isn’t quite dark enough to match Pepys’s, but it easily pulls readers through what is inarguably morbid and dense material. “‘Bloody Mary’ did not get her nickname by putting tomato juice in her vodka,’” he quips early on – then applauds the modern British monarchy for “not having a single relative decapitated, nor a single rival drawn and quartered.”

The Problem of Proportions

Pinker spends a disproportionate amount of time on the chapter “The Long Peace,” in which he successfully as possible negates the cliché espoused by just about everyone: That the 20th century, with its two world wars and the Holocaust, was the bloodiest one in human history.

Pinker doesn’t quite kill that cliché, but that’s only because it is impossible to do so. His argument hinges on the fact that although the sheer number of people killed in warfare in the 20th century is higher than any other century, the proportion of people killed compared to the human population is not. Whether or not absolute numbers matter more than proportions is an issue of opinion, and Pinker himself admits it.

The numbers supporting Pinker’s conclusions are still ultimately supported by his storytelling. Certain subsections like “The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels” are less riveting in comparison, and Pinker even throws in some mathematical probability for good measure. The mathematically and scientifically illiterate have nothing to fear. Pinker never delves deep enough into these areas to be too confusing or aloof, and readers who are convinced that violence has indeed declined can skim through what Pinker affectionately calls “the statistics of war” and still understand a majority of the more valuable points.

The Western World at Center Stage

For all Pinker’s storytelling prowess, one might easily decry Better Angels of Our Nature for its lingering sense of Eurocentrism. The vast majority of the anecdotes and figures are indeed devoted to medieval Europe and the Western world.

For this flaw, however, the book can be forgiven. Pinker spends more time sifting through the Anglosphere than he does anywhere else because this is where the downward trek of violence is most pronounced. That is where he has the most to prove, and that is where most of his attention is accordingly directed. After all, the overarching question of the book is not why there is still violence, but why there is unparalleled peace.

Regions of the world still seeped in this violence do not go entirely unmentioned. “The Muslim world, to all appearances, is sitting out the decline of violence,” Pinker observes in the chapter “The New Peace.” Indeed, a pocketful of countries still severely punish or kill homosexuals and adulterers – but the fact that most of the world no longer does should be noted and applauded. Pinker never pretends that there is no more progress to be made. Violence may have declined, but it certainly has not yet died.

Hands Off the Future

Despite the wide breadth of topics and adept writing in each of them, Pinker identifies promising trends without making many predictions. But for the future’s sake, Pinker implies that this most peaceable era is not one to take for granted. He evokes George Santayana’s famous quote toward the end of his book: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As Pinker so skillfully warns us, that past we want to avoid – like a happy crowd in 1660s London – is much bloodier than we tend to remember.

Each night

Eli Saslow, a staff writer at The Washington Post, has traveled across the country to spend time with ten authors of Obama’s letters. The product is Ten Letters, a story about America through the lives of its citizens, and of their complicated connections to the president. These authors include Democrats, Republicans, those alienated from politics, and those too young to have an affiliation. In their messages, they pour out the details of their lives and those of their families. They exhort Obama to act on various issues, both thanking the president and condemning him.

Lucy Gutierrez, an Arizona resident of Mexican heritage in her young twenties, was spurred to write one of these letters after seeing her town, Kingston, transformed after the passage of Arizona’s controversial immigration law. Senate Bill 1070 mandated the prosecution and deportation of illegal immigrants. Its passage forced Lucy to make a decision as the unofficial matriarch of the family: stay, in the midst of increasing discrimination and hostility, or go, as had over half of Kingston’s Hispanic population. As Saslow recounts, Lucy saw the bill in many forms. “It was the false rumors of immigration checkpoints at [Lucy’s] local grocery store and policemen sweeping through Hispanic neighborhoods wearing black ski masks. It was the empowered conservatives who walked around town wearing T-shirts that read ‘Why Should I Have to Press 1 For English?’…It was the cable customer who approached her desk at work angered by his bill and told her that ‘we don’t want you people here.’” Beleaguered by the stress, Lucy writes in her letter, “I am a U.S. citizen but I feel like I don’t belong here anymore.…Right after the bill was signed I went into a restaurant to buy breakfast and I was greeted by a gentleman who told me ‘I don’t know why they let you kind in here.’… Where is the America I thought I knew?”

Saslow explains that this connection between writer and president is increasingly valuable to Obama, living in an era where the Oval Office seems ever more remote from Americans’ daily concerns. The time when the public could make leisurely visits to the White House, joining the first family for meals, is long gone. Saslow notes that Obama, as the first black president, was given Secret Service protection a full eighteen months before the 2008 election, the earliest in history for a candidate.

Yet other letters are often a desperate last prayer for those affected by the president’s decisions. For Jen Cline, a young woman on the verge of filing for bankruptcy for the second time, it didn’t matter that no one might actually read her letter. The three pages, “more a stream- of-consciousness journal entry than a formal note,” was a cathartic exercise in itself. In such cases, the president seems like the one person who could make a difference, even though it is likely that he will never read the missive. For Hailey Hatcher, concerned with the fate of his town after the BP oil spill, Obama was last of the many politicians he had written to in an attempt to spur change.

Saslow is a master at evoking the authors’ stories through vivid dialogue, vignettes of daily life, and powerful language. One can’t help but grip Ten Letters tightly as Saslow depicts Natoma Canfield, a leukemia patient who becomes an important part of Obama’s fight for health reform, reluctantly swallowing her eleven daily pills, wincing through the pain caused by the abrasions chemotherapy has left in her mouth. Saslow does not romanticize these individuals; the people Saslow introduces his readers to when are those they run into on the street every day.

However, while Saslow’s narrative offers us three- dimensional Americans, the man who does fall through the cracks is Barack Obama. The president is shown entangled among constituents’ interests, balancing between catering to organizations, genuinely trying to express himself, and attempting to connect with the public. Saslow depicts Obama somewhere between the Obama of grandiose dreams and speeches the public sees, and the personal Obama with all his banality and his private passions.

Instead, the president’s own perspective in Ten Letters is a wistful recognition of the limits of his role. Comparing the presidency to his earlier days of community work, Obama reminisces: “The people were right there in front of me, and I could say, ‘Let’s go to the alderman’s office,’ or ‘Let me be an advocate in some fashion’… What I have to constantly reconcile in my mind is that I have a very specific role to play in this office, and I’ve got to make a bunch of big decisions that you hope in the aggregate will end up having a positive effect over this many lives.” In such a context, the letters are the president’s most honest window into a citizen’s life, yet words that cannot be directly answered in a forceful act of problem-solving. However, Obama often writes back, and on occasion sends a check or forwards the letter to a relevant public official with a note to “please take care of this.”

The letter writers are aware of the president’s limits. And yet, the poignancy of their messages lies in the connection they declare to Obama both as the president and as a fellow human being. “I’m sure you know, Mr. President, what it feels like being raised without a father… what would you do if it was your mom out there being treated like that?” asks teenage Jessica Duran. “I know you are a busy man…and on top of that having a family… But please understand I too have a family that expects me to fix everything for them,” explains Lucy. Whatever the number of Secret Service agents that now surrounds the president, or the protocol that carefully regulate the president’s every appearance, Ten Letters gently reminds us of those defining elements that remain as true as ever in Americans’ relationship to their president.

Lena Bae ’13 is a Staff Writer.

Photo Credit: Pete Souza, U.S. Federal Government

Harvard FML, the addicting symposium of academic and sexual frustration, shows that not much has changed in the 120 years since Frank Wedekind’s “Spring Awakening” was written. There are posts about pregnancy scares and abuse. There are frustrating questions submitted to the void about not knowing if Harvard is “worth it,” about ignorance and depression.

However, there seems to be something strange about one of the first college productions of “Spring Awakening” taking place in the People’s Republic of Cambridge; in a considerably liberal college environment, the issues that were viewed as so taboo in 1891 such as masturbation, sex and even general rebellion against society become that much harder to present as “controversial.” Most people at Harvard have a good knowledge about what sex is, and pre-marital sex is generally accepted as a fact of life. Therefore, it is interesting that the most-charged moment in the musical’s performance at OBERON was between the two homosexual characters, Hänschen and Ernst. It brings back the observation first shared with me by a professor in a class on capitalism and democracy in the former Soviet bloc: Great art is made easier by oppression.

Take Melchior Gabor, for instance. He is the protagonist of the musical, an academic superstar who cares not a whit about his perfect Trigonometry and Latin record. He instead spends his time scribbling about the adult society that suppresses him in the form of his draconian instructor. There is Moritz Stiefel, who struggles with his studies because of insomnia-inducing sexual dreams. There is Wendla Bergmann, who could be on the TV Show “I’m Pregnant and I Didn’t Know It.” However, in a 21st century context, all of these struggles are hardly taboo. Masturbation and sex are not unmentionable topics, and creative endeavors and radical social thought are not viewed as destructive.

Therefore, when the audience experiences a moment between two male German youths, Hänschen and Ernst, some of the real “forbidden” aspect finally comes through in the acting. An entire play, built on the relationship of two heterosexual characters, holds but one five-minute interlude of something that truly is rebellious in the 21st century.

I think this unearths a question that has a nebulous answer: Should plays and musicals only chronicle things that have yet to be breached? Is there a place for more dated stories such as Porgy and Bess (another recent A.R.T. production) or, indeed, Spring Awakening, which was immensely controversial at the time of its writing? And, in a related vein, is it a more personal, subjective experience that makes one scene seem more controversial than the next? I hail from rural Texas, in a town where pre-marital sex was viewed as in much of the country: a fact of life. Homosexuality, on the other hand, was viewed as grounds for harassment.

Yet keeping this more contemporary bias in mind, it still stands that the audience has a remarkable ability to engage with drama on the work’s own terms—no matter how far removed from the present. “Les Miserables” still makes audiences bawl the world over even though no one is really dying on the barricades. “The Lion King” holds the spot as many individuals’ favorite musical even though the characters live in a world unfathomable in the modern era. So it is interesting that “Spring Awakening” was unable to convince my theatre-going compatriots and I that the relationship between Melchior and Wendla was forbidden instead of inevitable. It could be the particular production; it could be the story itself. But nevertheless, I wonder how far the dramatic envelope can really be pushed within the play’s antique, more Puritanical parameters.

—

SPRING AWAKENING SUMMARY:

Last Wednesday, a Harvard student production of “Spring Awakening” ( premiered at OBERON. The rock musical, which chronicles sexually blossoming German youths, predictably skyrocketed to national prominence in 2007 when it grabbed eight Tony Awards including Best Musical.

Jeffrey Sachs’

Sachs, an economist at Columbia University and president of the school’s Earth Institute, is one of many authors who have lately focused on forming an account of America’s problems. His diagnosis largely concerns what he sees as the political transformations aligning American governance with the interests of the elite over the masses. Yet all this is but a symptom of a larger national malaise, one Sachs hopes to address by shifting the public interest from the pursuit of wealth to that of happiness.

In covering controversial issues of such a sweeping character, Sachs occasionally comes off as polemical, and at times loses track of the firm economic basis for his prescriptions. In large, however, The Price of Civilization stands out as an astute overview of America’s contemporary ills—economic, political, and even cultural. Moreover, Sachs uniquely works to broaden the scope of his macroeconomic inquiry, changing the target of his policy proposals from material affluence to a more holistic understanding of public wellbeing.

Patient History

Sachs views his work as “clinical economics,” focused on understanding all the particularities of his patient in order to prescribe an effective cure. The book’s first part documents the deleterious symptoms afflicting America, exhibiting the issues—decreasing infrastructure spending, declines in human capital, abysmal PISA test scores—in literally graphic detail. Sachs does not, however, overuse his reams of data. Instead, he succinctly presents the relevant and alarming evidence with all the panache of a scatter plot, before moving on to his more substantive work of the book.

As a clinician and commentator, Sachs rightly concerns much of his investigation with the patient’s history: in this case, America between the presidencies of Carter and Obama. During this period, the author argues, popular governance gave way to plutocracy. The country ceased to be a “mixed economy,” Sachs believes. In this narration, it was initially Carter who “began the processes of deregulation,” supplying momentum for the looming “Reagan Revolution” of tax cuts for top earners, decreased spending on civilian programs, deregulation (especially in finance), and outsourcing of core government services. “All four of these major policy changes took hold in the 1980s,” Sachs writes, “and are still in place today.”

Undue Infection

The lasting triumph of the Reagan Revolution is due in no small part to Reagan’s successors, Sachs argues, who have been subsumed into what the author derides as a “corporatocracy.” Moneyed interests stifle more populist and progressive public policy in Sachs’ account, infecting even the supposedly left- wing administrations of Clinton and Obama. Ultimately, the undue influence cripples the possibility of solving America’s chronic problems, leaving the country in a “New Gilded Age.” Pressing concerns of the larger public, such as healthcare or outsourcing, seem wholly alien to the powerful elite.

Here Sachs’ writing takes on a vitriolic tone, sometimes at the expense of accuracy. For example, it is certainly true that, like his predecessor, Obama ignored campaign finance reform during his first term as president, leaving the floodgates of corporate electioneering ajar. But when Sachs seriously asks, “What have been the real differences between Bush and Obama?,” one has to wonder if the author is evenhanded about “Obamacare’s” namesake. Passages like these sound more like Paul Krugman than an honest clinician.

Nonetheless, the author’s course of treatment for America’s political paralysis largely makes up for his polemical forays. Though he at first stumbles, hinting at his hopes for a third party under the moniker of “Alliance for the Radical Center” to galvanize the voting populace, Sachs finds firm footing promoting such initiatives as public campaign finance and bans on lobbying. With these in place, the author foresees a Congress that is no longer “a maze of special interests,” and a president who can stand as a real agent of change.

The Pursuit of Happiness

As central as these political concerns appear, though, Sachs sees America’s problems as rooted in a deeper “moral crisis.” Not only are national politics rotten, the constituents are ill informed or misled about its functions—if they even care about them in the first place. Sachs points to more profound failings: Americans watch too much television, buy too much on credit to satisfy ephemeral cravings, and are overall unhappier than their global peers, not only in Sweden and Denmark, but also in countries like Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. America is caught, Sachs writes, on a “Hedonic Treadmill” of sorts, clamoring to get richer and ending up more miserable in the process.

In his freewheeling furor Sachs sometimes manages to stray from his primarily empirical enterprise. Do we really need, as the author suggests, the spiritual teachings of the Dalai Lama to tell us to turn off the TV or reign in our shopping sprees? Fortunately, Sachs returns to his more mundane subject of national welfare in due course. Here the author’s choice of words from the late senator Robert Kennedy ring truer than those of the Buddha: “For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things.” Wealth for Sachs is not an end unto itself; it is a means towards common happiness, broader issues, broader scope

To this more “holistic” end, as he calls it, Sachs proposes establishing “national metrics for life satisfaction,” the goal being to shift the public focus from “How much money are you making?” to “How are you feeling today?” Granted, such an approach is at times more emotional than economical, just as The Price of Civilization more closely resembles a work of public psychology than one of sterile statistics. Yet for Sachs, the quantitative and qualitative poles of his study inform a larger, more accurate macro snapshot of both states of the union—material as well as mental. Adhering to the above dichotomy merely amounts to policy analysis with one eye closed.

The rub, of course, comes down to paying for these pleasing programs. But as Sachs notes, Scandinavian governments maintain national euphoria through prudent practices, without any gaping deficits. While the requisite trade-off is higher taxes, it is a bill that Sachs thinks America can and should foot. This is, perhaps, the price of a civilization worth inhabiting.

Eli Kozminsky ’14 is a Staff Writer.

Lisa Randall

Ecco. 512 pp. $27.95.

Einstein was legendarily larger-than-life. He revolutionized modern physics while employed as a clerk in a patent office in Switzerland. He was photogenic in a silly sort of way, setting the prototype for the twentieth century’s depiction of mad science. He was quotable: “only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” His name, to this day, is synonymous with genius. However, popular culture seems to think modern physics ended shortly after Einstein, with quantum mechanics. It very much didn’t.

That’s why Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions is a valuable book. Lisa Randall, a Harvard professor of theoretical physics, guides a reader through the many significant discoveries in particle physics that have taken place over the past hundred years, which are generally united in a theory called the Standard Model. Basic physics, as you may have learned it in high school or in entry-level college courses, leaves many questions about the nature of the universe unanswered. Those questions are not remote from everyday life, either, but concern such fundamental questions as why anything has mass.

Randall starts her survey with a review of relativity and quantum mechanics in one short chapter each. Those chapters explain their concepts incredibly well given the space they take to do it, but they could easily leave a reader, particularly one who was seeing those concepts for the first time, reeling a little. That is a pattern that will continue through the rest of the book. Randall then dives into the search for ever-more elementary particles that has occupied physics for years. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the one which you’ve probably seen on the news, was built to try to find two types of Higgs particles, a type of sub-nuclear particle. She explains why they would matter: the two types should, theoretically, have very similar masses. However, preliminary experimental results suggest that one’s mass is ten trillion times that of the other. Once physicists can create a theory that cleanly accounts for both, we will be much closer to understanding both mass and gravity.

Finally, Randall reaches the heart of her book, the theoretical possibilities of the warped dimensions of the title. It’s heady stuff, but slightly easier, and more fun, than the background it took to get to it. It’s still theoretical, but holds the promise of explaining some of the mysteries of physics. The particular one that these dimensions hope to explain is one of gravity’s properties.

There are four fundamental forces in the universe: gravity, the electromagnetic force, the strong force, and the weak force. The weak force’s name is misleading, because gravity is the weakest of the forces in our universe by many, many orders of magnitude. The weak force was so named because gravity is so weak that it can be almost entirely ignored on a sub-atomic scale, and the weak force is the weakest of the remaining three. Randall, in collaboration with Raman Sundrum, proposed a theory in 1999 that could help explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other three. That theory, which she explains, posits that gravity is so much weaker because it works on a more complicated set of dimensions than those of which we are usually aware, which offset its force. The background took the reader up to the present. Randall’s work explains where physics might go in the future.

As I said earlier, this book can leave a reader’s head spinning. However, Randall does a good job with an extraordinarily difficult subject. She does a near-perfect job of walking the middle road between the two cardinal sins of science writing: on the one hand, using equations instead of words, and on the other, making the science stupid. There is not one solitary equation in the text of the book, although there is a short set of endnotes with more math. Randall might have gone too far when she did so, as there were a few places where bringing the endnotes into the text, or just stating an idea in both an equation and the text, would have clarified. Nevertheless, writing this 450-page tome on high-level physics is a monumental feat, even if I quibble with it on the margins. Even without equations, however, Warped Passages is extremely informative. It cannot be accused of being overly dumbed-down. Instead, the book is a warp tour through the past hundred years of big ideas in modern physics, and even into the future. As for the symptom of head-spinning when the number of big ideas gets to be too much, take it slowly. This book isn’t too difficult. As long as a reader consumes it in small portions, it’s all eminently digestible, and worth the time it takes to think about it.

I think that the best illustration I have for why one should read this book is in the changed reaction I had to news stories about the LHC. Before I read this book, my thoughts tended to run along the lines of “Ah, the scientists! In Switzerland! Where they do sub-atomic things. Explosions, maybe?” Having read Warped Passages, I now understand, as much as somebody who doesn’t even know much calculus can, what the scientists there are trying to do. I understand the problems that they’re trying to solve, and the ways in which they expect that those problems might be solved, and the areas where they don’t know what to expect. I also understand the theoretical models to which physics might turn if and when the Standard Model fails.

Jean-Francois Drolet

256 pp. Columbia University Press. $30. 

Jean-François Drolet’s American Neoconservatism, a concise blend of political theory, intellectual history, and contemporary politics, marks one of those rare occurrences of highly relevant academic literature. Drolet’s aim in the work is to challenge the neoconservative hearkening for a moral, united America by uncovering the doctrine’s anti-Enlightenment ideological roots, and so reveal it as an ideology based on anti-liberal values. His message is a persuasive one, and he adds to it with insight into the ambiguous position neoconservatism has in contemporary American politics: that is, in our current state of blurry post-neoconservatism.

The story that Drolet details is a familiar one. Neoconservatism took shape among the group of mostly Jewish intellectuals at the City College of New York in the 1930s and ‘40s, who numbered as members Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer. The still-young theorists began as Trotskyists, but quickly grew disillusioned with Stalin’s brutality. Turning to support FDR’s New Deal, they also were chagrined by the “excesses” of the welfare state, and shocked by the social and cultural upheavals of the ‘60s. So neoconservatism evolved in the next two decades as its own political faction, aligning with the Republican Party after Jimmy Carter’s weak performance as president and Ronald Reagan’s promising election.

Drolet digs deeply into this account by focusing most of his attention on the man who inspired these voices of neoconservatism: Leo Strauss. Strauss, a Jewish-German émigré who specialized in classical political philosophy, critiqued the prevailing progressivism of his era by problematizing Enlightenment liberalism, arguing its embrace of reason led to the dissolution of any commanding truth, which resulted in the kind of moral relativism that could lead to the rise of extremists, such as the Nazis. Strauss claimed that the state should not abdicate its hold on morality, but instead take on the responsibility of “cultivating” its citizens. Liberalism, by allowing individuals to define happiness on their own terms, led to democratic decline.

The idea resonated with the New York intellectuals, members of the silent majority who viewed ‘60s radicalism as a degrading exercise, and to whom value-neutral social science seemed only to justify individual morals. Kristol questioned in 1970, “how can a bourgeois society survive in a cultural ambiance that derides every traditional bourgeois virtue and celebrates promiscuity, homosexuality, drugs, political terrorism…?” His reaction was to fight liberal nihilism with a crusade of tradition. For Kristol, this was a return to ordinary American values. In fact, he argued that “the ‘neo’ in neoconservatism is [the] insistence that the American people have always had an instinctive deference toward such standards.”

Drolet paints these early neoconservative sentiments as deluded. Neoconservatives were not advocating for the preservation of the Framers’ virtues, but for an anti-democratic idea of society antithetical to natural rights. The neocon prescription was based on a static, homogenous definition of American culture and values, protected from interference by citizens. As Drolet argues, the neoconservative project “is not so much to ‘conserve’ this bourgeois society as to transform it into a post-welfare community of values within the existing class structure… a politically motivated de-politicization of social relations that ultimately separates liberalism from democracy.” The de-legitimization of citizen demands and the role of the state in regulating economic inequities is far from the essential, creative role of dissent that the Framers had been careful to weave into the Constitution’s fabric.

At the heart of Drolet’s reading of neoconservatism is his assertion that the ideology is “polyarchic,” an idea developed by Seymour Martin Lipset and inspired by Joseph Schumpeter’s classic idea of elitist democracy—formed in the authoritarian inter-war milieu. According to Schumpeter, polyarchic democracy is a process by which competing elites battle for the approval of a largely passive electorate. The political elite also manipulates the public’s general will, supposedly for the good of society. Drolet argues that the polyarchic model is vital to neoconservatism for two reasons: first, like neoconservatism, the model separates politics from economics, leaving socio-economic inequality unquestioned; second, it de-legitimizes bottom-up struggles by civil society, removing the transformative potential of democracy. Drolet argues that such an elitist conception of democracy was legitimized under Reagan, who combined it with aspects of neoliberalism to form the Washington Consensus, shaping the world’s perception of the U.S. as a modern capitalist, imperial power.

In the early 1990s, neoconservatives might have dismissed this critical view. Neconservatism had critics (and few back then), but so what? In the aftermath of the Cold War and the U.S. victory, the neocon reading of America’s role seemed aligned with world events – and its dangers weren’t apparent. The alternative, a drawback from ideological quests, seemed a sacrifice of the kind of political stability the U.S. had successfully created. And with 9/11, another battlefront opened up; America launched a decidedly moral response to a threat—terrorists—harboring a complete lack of morality. This departure from realism may not have been less moral, but was certainly more dangerous. Yet, despite the criticisms liberals and more traditional conservatisms have made of it, as Drolet repeatedly points out throughout “American Neoconservatism”, neoconservatism has been accepted as a thoroughly American ideology.

Of course, to Drolet, this is a strange anomaly. Given that neoconservatism is anti-liberal and largely anti-democratic, predatory upon the American ideal of natural right, how is it that the doctrine has become so established in the platforms of not only the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party as well? Alexandra Homolar-Riechmann of the University of Leicester notes in Contemporary Politics how neoconservative arguments for capitalism’s moral justification, religion’s public relevance, and individual merit’s stature within a limited welfare state are widely accepted in America. In the realm of foreign policy, institutions supportive of the Democratic Party (many of which sprung up to match the neocon network in recent years), call for promoting “Democratic” values abroad through a balance of ideals and realism, a program that doesn’t sound very different from that of neoconservatives. And after all, military spending under Obama is higher than under Bush, and the current president hasn’t exhibited an effort to invest in diplomacy and cultural exchange before relying on military solutions.

The answer might lie somewhere in the difficulty Obama has faced in holding on to both value-based process and value-centric ends in a world of insecure nation-states and distinct codes of legality. Moreover, despite Drolet’s larger argument that neoconservatism is a liberal contradiction, the neoconservative championing of the free market ideal has been a common theme throughout our country’s short history. Ultimately, the fact that neoconservatism exerts a significant influence over American politics is one left unexplained in American Neoconservatism. However, Drolet’s well-articulated work leaves us in a better position to challenge it.

Corruption in India is a nationwide game in which every citizen willingly participates, from politicians to peasants. But in the hugely popular Bollywood political thriller No One Killed Jessica, a film that has become a landmark of India’s burgeoning anti-corruption movement, this message is largely missed. Rather than taxi drivers, the film wags a finger at the social elite: important figures in the corruption establishment, but far from the only culprits. As India’s wave of anti-corruption advocacy gains force, finding popular media symbols that accurately represent the problem remains the crucial step.

No One Killed Jessica is based on the true story of the Jessica Lall murder. In April 1999, Lall, an aging model, was shot while bartending at the restaurant Tamarind Court Café in Delhi. Prosecutors identified Manu Sharma, the son of a Haryana state congressman, as the killer. Manu had apparently bristled at Jessica’s refusing to serve him after the bar closed and shot her out of anger. However, 29 eyewitnesses later retracted their statements, claiming that their memory of the situation had changed, and Manu was acquitted. After a national media storm, Manu was hauled back into court and sentenced to life imprisonment, 26 of the 29 eyewitnesses were accused of perjury, and the Tamarind Court Café was shut down.

The film, released in January, has been hugely successful, both financially and politically. It has grossed $4.6 million since release, $4.1 million of which was in India. This is an impressive total, given that Indian movie tickets often cost less than $1. Of course, the film was conceived as a popular success, headlined by Bollywood superstar Rani Mukherjee as a crusading reporter, and featuring a strong performance by Vidya Balan, as Jessica’s quietly vengeful sister.

More importantly, however, No One Killed Jessica has become an important part of the national Indian discourse on corruption, as reflected by its reviews. The Times of India said of the film: “Raj Kumar Gupta shows absolute conviction in bringing to life one of the most significant murder-case convictions in the history of India. No one miss this cinema!” The Hindu proclaimed: “Seven years after Jessica was shot dead, a nation wakes up to fight for justice.” The film grew popular at opportune time for India’s anti-corruption movement. Although complaints about corruption have bubbled since the disastrous 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, an more full good-government movement gained traction in April 2011, coalescing around activist Anna Hazare’s hunger fast “unto death,” and demanding the passage of an anti-corruption bill in the Indian Congress. In this sense, No One Killed Jessica proved an important endorsement of the anti-corruption movement by powerful figures in entertainment and politics, at a time when the movement was still struggling for attention.

Of course, the entertainment industry knew its motives. The cinema proves a powerful tool in Indian politics. For a country only 63 percent literate, movies are an important form of information as well as entertainment. The industry is valued at $1 billion, and sells 36 billion tickets annually, compared to Hollywood’s 2.6 billion. Further, while the Western entertainment industry is highly fragmented between films, television, Internet media, social networks, and music, the Indian entertainment industry is mostly driven by Bollywood.

However, the political influence of No One Killed Jessica raises an important question: does the movie portray corruption in an accurate manner? In a noteworthy way, it does not. The film places undue responsibility for corruption on India’s rich and famous. The film’s eyewitnesses (which jump from 29 to 300) are cast as Delhi’s most fashionable and powerful, and Gupta posits that they were bribed and intimidated by the powerful Sharma family to retract their original testimonies. As one poor witness objects, “What would you do if you were offered the choice of 10 million rupees or a bullet?” Not only are the eyewitnesses not commoners, but their corrupt retractions are motivated by plausible threats of death – quite unlike the experience of most day-to-day corruption in India.

Transparency International’s 2005 India Corruption study illustrates the many layers of the problem. Based on a sample of 14,000 citizens in 20 of 28 states, it found that, “As high as 62 percent of citizens think that the corruption is not a hearsay, but they in fact have had firsthand experience of paying a bribe or ‘using a contact’ to get a job done in a public office.” The study also showed that only 15 percent of Indians believe that corruption is the fault of citizens and that 33 percent believe that corruption is a fact of life.

In more qualitative terms, the daily presence of corruption can be seen through corruption blogs such as ipaidabribe.com, which allows users to post the most egregious bribes they have been asked to pay (and have often paid). From Meerut comes a post: “My father who is about to retire in one month’s time from UPPCL was asked by his Executive Engineer to pay a bribe of 10,000 to release his service book, so he can get pension and funds on time.” From Bangalore: “I had to forfeit 20 percent of my Agriculture produce to HOPCOMS. They billed only for 80 percent of my supplied agri-produce and took almost 20 percent unaccounted.” Bribe posts are even split into categories: “police,” “registration,” “motor vehicles,” “municipal services,” and “customs.”

Corruption in India is a common thing, but No One Killed Jessica presents it as an almost rarefied event, shifting responsibility for better governance away from civic society. In a country where graft is as much a part of the exchange of goods and services as money itself, and the collective actions of a billion people give it staying power, anti-corruption needs an accurate model. In the days after Manu is initially acquitted of Jessica’s murder, the film shows a massive vigil for Jessica in a large public space in Delhi. People across the city come out in t-shirts and signs reading, “I am Jessica.” What they should be thinking is: “Am I Manu?”

Mylo Xyloto?

Yes, that’s Mylo Xyloto.  As far as album titles go, this one definitely raises some questions, particularly how in the world is it pronounced and, more importantly, what can it possibly mean?  For starters, the correct pronunciation is “My-lo Zyle-toe,” but if the pronunciation itself proves confusing, then the meaning of the title is a veritable Gordian Knot!  In response to fans’ incessant inquiries, lead singer Chris Martin mystically waves his hand in the air and teases, “We took it from the randomness of the universe.”  Consequently, I can’t help but think that attempts to label Mylo Xyloto miss the point. Maybe Mylo Xyloto, more than conveying any specific meaning, stands as a richly ambiguous symbol of pure creativity, undefinable and free.  As Chris Martin, explains:

“Something about it feels quite fresh. The title doesn’t have any other meaning. I think we’re a band with a lot of history now so it’s nice to come up with something that doesn’t have any history at all. We’ve had that title for about two years on a board and any other potential titles had to be written next to it. Other ones made more sense but we just liked this one, that’s all we can defend it with.”

Yet, this has not stopped people in any way from extrapolating the meaning of the title.  Some ambitious fans, self-pronounced etymologists, conjecture that Mylo Xyloto translates into “My Love, Wooden Lotus.”  At least they manage to change the nonsense into English.  The same cannot be said of others who take a still more radical approach and point to the tracks “U.F.O.” and “A Hopeful Transmission” to boldly argue that Mylo Xyloto doesn’t make any sense to us because it’s obviously in an alien language.  Even Stephen Colbert takes a stab at it, and quips that Mylo Xyloto must be Greek for “Miley Cyrus.”  Clearly, Mylo Xyloto has the world – fans and critics alike – utterly baffled.

Although the ambiguity of the title and Chris Martin’s evasive responses are certainly sources of frustration for all the fans desperately hoping to make sense of this two-word conundrum, Chris Martin’s statements are not completely unhelpful. Instead, they emphasize the importance of Mylo Xyloto’s indefinability. Mylo Xyloto refuses to be tacked down and this focus on unbridled creativity and free expression reveals the album’s fundamental connection to its sources of inspiration.  Coldplay has explained that this album was created against the rich backdrop of several protest traditions.  The diverse sources of inspiration range from the student-led, anti-Nazi group known as the White Rose Movement, the rebellious art form of graffiti, and the criticisms of government presented in the television series The Wire.  Coldplay intertwines all of these themes, particularly freedom from oppression and the power of creativity, in Mylo Xyloto.   This background allows the otherwise overused concept of love and heartbreak to present itself in a totally fresh and original way, functioning as an allegory for social protest.  Thus, Coldplay sets out to show both the hope that fuels protest as well as the troubles that can befall it – just as love, though beautiful, can also take a turn for the worse.  To this effect, the album has three main acts, each separated by a brief interlude of under a minute.

Paradise

The first song, “Mylo Xyloto” is a shimmering entrance that smoothly transitions into the kinetic and upbeat synth-pop of “Hurts Like Heaven.”  Then the cosmic, glittering guitars fade out into the stylish and majestic “Paradise” which has unsurprisingly managed to jump into iTunes’ top twenty.  “Paradise” absolutely brims with hope and best represents the first act.  Martin sings, “And underneath those stormy skies she said, ‘I know the sun must set to rise’” and then the song explodes into the ever-so-catchy refrain “This could be Para-para-paradise.” In this way, “Paradise” reveals the potential of individuals to transform their world.  A vision of paradise, of a utopia, can tenaciously take hold of the mind and fuel individuals with a fervent determination to better their world.  Indeed, when Chris Martin sings, he stands alongside Hans and Lisa Scholls of the White Rose Movement, and the guitars, with their captivating music, create the same vibrant expression of graffiti art.

“Paradise” is by all means a tough act to follow, but Coldplay bursts forth with colorful exuberance in “Charlie Brown”.  This endearing song blends in the melody of Vince Guaraldi’s well-known “Linus and Lucy” and closes with a “Christmastime is Here”-themed ending, and in effect, conveys the sweet tenderness and purity of love.  In contrast to the frenetic pace of “Charlie Brown,” “Us Against the World” is more ponderous and spacey, and the serenity of the song suggests that love can act as a sanctuary against the harshness of the world.  Accordingly, Chris Martin sings “so whatever you do, don’t let go,” a line which implies the possibility of breakup and thus, foreshadows the second act.

Up in Flames

The second act begins just as vividly as the first with “Every Tear is a Waterfall.”  But if the music sounds relatively upbeat it also creates the sense of gradually building tension.  This song is well characterized by the line, “Maybe I’m in the gap between the two trapeze… cathedrals in my heart.”  Gone is the idealism that captured the first act and now everything seems to be held in a delicate balance.  Success is no longer certain and the world holds its breath.  Indeed, the situation takes a turn for the worse and “Major Minus” quickly shifts the mood with its disconcerting warning call “They’ve got one eye watching you/one eye on what you do.  So be careful.”  Here, Coldplay’s classic falsetto “oohs” sound more like siren wails than their usually catchy pop flourishes.  A sense of urgency and danger lurks under every distorted chord.  Of all the songs in the album, this one has the most directly political message, a caution against government surveillance. “U.F.O.” continues this downward spiral, evincing a sense of lost purpose and direction.  Chris Martin sings “Lord I don’t know which way I am going…  It’s just seems that upstream, I keep rowing/Still got such a long way to go.”  The hopeful outlook of the first act has dissipated and the possibility of attaining paradise now seems further off than ever before.

“Princess of China,” appropriately brings in the princess of pop, Rihanna.  This song is a pulsing, catchy duet and again conveys the image of a lost paradise.  The lyrics proceed almost like a fairytale, “Once upon a time, somebody ran… Once upon a time we fell apart,” but like “Major Minus” all is not right, and there is an undeniably tragic tone to the piece. A song of unrealized dreams, Rihanna laments “Could’ve had a castle and worn a ring, but no.” Again, a parallel can be drawn between a shattered relationship and a crumbling protest movement.  In both situations, hopes are liable to be disappointed and ultimately, fall apart.

Finally, this second act reaches a climax in the aptly named, “Up in Flames.”  Sadness pulses through this song and a melancholy piano compliments Chris Martin’s falsetto which wonderfully conveys heart-wrenching grief.  Each time he sings the refrain with such tenderness and pain that the constantly repeated line “Up in Flames” expresses piercing pain.  With these agonized wails, the second movement comes to a tragic close and as the guitars fade out, they echo the lingering sadness of something lovely lost.

Up With the Birds

The colorful clinking and clattering of “A Hopeful Transmission” quickly reestablishes a sense of hope and “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” reinvigorates the album by the inspiration not to give up.  Clearly, Coldplay has no intention of leaving fans downcast and teary-eyed. Consequently, “Up with the Birds” begins like an uplifting spiritual.  Half-way through, the song switches gears and increases its pace.  As Martin sings, “Send me up to that wonderful world/ and then I’m up with the birds,” listeners can’t help but remember the image of paradise evoked in the first act.  So for Coldplay, the message ends on a hopeful note.  Although plans may fall apart, love may turn into pain, and the world might seem to go “Up in Flames,” hope remains.  And thus, even failed protests movements succeed in that they keep the vision of paradise alive.  Paradise lives on, for there is always a chance to start again.

Concluding Remarks

In short, Mylo Xyloto, with its cosmic, synth-laden sound, is a welcome change to the Coldplay formula. The clear falsettos and cool “oohs” that have made Coldplay so famous are all here and are sure to keep fans satisfied until their next album.  Yet, there is an undeniable vibrancy present in Mylo Xyloto that wasn’t there before. The heavy use of synths adds new layers of richness and colorful bleeps and other electronic noises sprinkled throughout the album come off as startlingly fresh.  The use of techno sounds gives the entire album a cosmic, almost psychedelic feel.  Overall, these techniques dapple the music with variegated hues and in this respect, the parallels with graffiti art are especially poignant.

Thus, with Mylo Xyloto, Colplay remains mainstream but in no way becomes generic.  Sure, it goes over the clichéd theme of “heartbreak” that saturates the music world, but by placing it in the context of resistance to authority, it manages to give this otherwise trite theme new life.  Moreover, Mylo Xyloto refuses to be limited and so, it becomes about more than love – even more than social protest.  Coldplay’s latest album is a statement on the power of individuals to change the world for the better, through love, through protest, through music – through any means of expression. So, if Mylo Xyloto should be seen as anything, it is as an attempt to raise music to another level, to allow it to transcend the pigeonhole categories of “pop” or “alternative” and become art, pure, free and powerful enough to inspire and effect change in the world.  In this sense, maybe it’s less about deciphering Mylo Xyloto, than coming to discover it.

Harvard is one of the most diversely talented colleges in the country, and many times students don’t even know the extent of their peer’s abilities. In our new series, we interview and showcase some of the college’s best artists and their work.

Harvard Political Review: Let’s go with the classic freshman details – hometown & concentration.

Nick Mendez: I’m from Washington, D.C., just outside of Arlington, Virginia, but I went to high school in D.C. I’m interested in concentrating in Gov, probably with a secondary in Economics.

HPR: How and when did you get started with your playing and singing?

NM: I got started with guitar in summer camp, in ninth grade….I learned “Mad World,” which is a pretty depressing song from Donnie Darko. That was the first song I played and performed….The fall of senior year, I got a guitar for Christmas, and it was really tough because I was writing all my college apps, and I had this new guitar that I wanted to play all the time, but I couldn’t because I had to write my apps. That’s when I got really serious about guitar. It was senior year.

HPR: Do you have any specific musical inspirations? I remember you did sort of a John Mayer, Eric Clapton kind of thing when you came to the HPR the other night.

NM: I like John Mayer a lot, he’s a good guy, but I really like Bob Dylan. I really like the basics, I really like acoustic guitar. I really like a sort of a really simple sound. I turn to Bob Dylan as someone who’s sort of more of a role model.  I love Mumford & Sons, The Avett Brothers, Eric Clapton, John Mayer, ACDC…it really ranges. Then, as a classical musician, I love Vivaldi: he’s one of my favorite composers of all time. It’s a tough question. I listen to pretty much any music that you’ll throw at me.

HPR: Do you want your music to have any special significance for the people listening to it? Do you want it to serve some kind of function?

NM: Well, what I think is really cool is that I’m also really interested in government. On my gap year, I actually worked on a political campaign in Colorado for five months. I went out and interned during the primary for Senator Bennett’s campaign. He’s the Democratic senator in Colorado now, got hired when we won the primary. I was the youngest paid staffer working for the campaign in Colorado. When you’re doing field-organizing work and you’re doing a lot of phone banking, you realize how venomous politics can be.…I really like playing music because everyone—you know, within reason—music is something everyone appreciates and it’s sort of a unifying thing. I’m very interested in music because of its restorative powers. It can heal. But I sort of like it because it brings people together.

HPR: I also remember you said during your performance that you went to the Sidwell Friends School in D.C.—do you think you have an interest in government because you basically grew up and went to school in the heart of government? What do you think about the intersection between music and politics?

NM: [Sidwell Friends] was a very political school, and politics has been a part of my life pretty much since—you know, when you grow up in D. C. with the federal government in your backyard- everything everyone does in D.C. is somehow related to the government, to The Hill.  A lot of my friends had parents who worked on The Hill, a lot of my friends interned on The Hill with me….I guess it’s always been part of me when I was growing up. I’ve always been exposed to it, so I really like it. My family in the Philippines was pretty involved in politics there as well, so when I grew up I was interested in the United Nations and stuff like that because my grandpa worked there.

I guess that the fusion of music and politics is tempering the venom—I think it’s hard to have music that’s very venomous, and that kind of music I tend not to listen to, but you know music is something that can bring people together, whereas politics can really drive people apart.

HPR: How was your Freshman Talent Show experience?

NM: I think I’ll remember that for the rest of my life. It was by far the biggest crowd I’ve ever played in front of. When I auditioned it was a very chill process, because it was when the hurricane was going on.… the whole audition was so low key, I didn’t notice how many people you play for, so when you started to see the video feed of how many people are in Sanders, I thought, “this is so many people, I’m going to school with everybody for the next four years, so I really can’t screw up. I really can’t be that guy.”

It was a lot of pressure. Thankfully, everyone else who did the talent show was really supportive. We were all sitting in a room underneath Sanders together. Rehearsing, just jamming. We all played “Lean on Me” together for a while, which was very fun.

HPR: Where would you like to take your music playing, either in college or afterward? Do you have any thoughts about a career in music?

NM: The music industry is really tough, and it’s not as straightforward. I’m pretty comfortable with government and politics and that scene especially because I know how to navigate it a lot better….When I was working In Colorado, for instance, when you work for a political campaign, you get to the office at 8:30, set up and from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. you have call time, so all you do is call, recruit volunteers….You can be at the office anywhere between 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. in the morning during the week and then on weekends it really depends….

So when I went home at night, it’s really nice to feel you did something else in the day for yourself other than just work. I play a lot of guitar right before I go to bed, and it’s a really great way to relax and kick back and feel like you do something really constructive….

I don’t see myself as being a professional musician in the future, but I like music because it’s a great way to sit down with people and just play. Paul Hodes, who lost the Senate race in New Hampshire, in 2010…he’s an incredible musician. You can use it as a tool to relax, a tool to have fun.

Harvard is one of the most diversely talented colleges in the country, and many times students don’t even know the extent of their peer’s abilities. In our new series, we interview and showcase some of the college’s best artists and their work.

HPR: Hey Meredith, thanks for taking time out to meet with me and to share about your music. So let me start with the first question: how did this all get started for you?

MB: I always wrote poems in high school, but I began to wonder if I could turn them into songs. With that in mind, I started learning guitar so I could translate them to music.

I find songwriting a great form a therapy, especially to get away from all the stress here at Harvard. Also, when I travel, I always take my guitar with me so I can play for the people I’m with. I was teaching in Nambia one summer and I played my students the song “Baby, Baby” during one morning in assembly. In a couple of weeks they were telling me in the hallway: “Miss Baker, play ‘Baby, Baby’!’.” It was a great moment for me.

HPR: Who would you consider major influences in terms of your playing style?

MB: John Mayer, he is my musical inspiration. I think all his songs have really described my experiences in life. Just as my songs describe friendships that I’ve had or dealing with a broken heart, I’ve found him to be a huge influence in the kind of songs I like to write.

HPR: So how often do you find yourself writing music?

MB: I write about once a month. Once I’m inspired to write about something, an idea or concept I’ve been thinking about, I’ll write it out in about 10 minutes.

This summer, I went to Israel and Cyprus which were such beautiful places. Even though I was travelling alone, I loved being there so much I was inspired to write a song, “Alone In Paradise”. That’s my first song on the ukelele.

HPR: Could you tell me more about your song-writing process? Do the lyrics come first, or does a tune pop out in your head, or is a mix between?

MB: Usually something significant happens in my life, and then I think about how I want to remember it – a lesson that I’ve learnt, or a specific feeling I’ve had. Once it crystallizes, I put it down into writing in about 10 minutes and I’ll try not to change it as much as possible.

HPR: Where do you see yourself going with your music? Are you considering the industry?

MB: I would love to, though right now I’m looking at performing more and meeting other musicians. What makes me really happy is performing and making my audience happy too. In the end I want to give it a shot, no matter what happens. I don’t want to look back next time when I’m 40 or something and regret that I didn’t at least try.

HPR: What is the favorite song you’ve written so far and what is it about?

MB: That’s a tough question, but my favorite song would probably be the first song I ever wrote “Baby, Baby” — not to be confused with Justin Bieber. It’s about how everything will work out in the end and discovering the little things you really enjoy in life.

HPR: Do you feel that Harvard has given you enough opportunities to perform and exhibit your music?

MB: Though I’ve been able given some opportunities at several events like the Eliot House barbeque, the Starbucks in the Square, the Asian American Association’s Coffee House – and the recent HPR meeting – I wish there were more venues to perform.

Baby, Baby (Namibia):

http://youtu.be/oZJg09G9qSw

Alone in Paradise (on the ukelele in Rio):

http://youtu.be/YBZoMlWw0go

Beside Me (in Kenya):

http://youtu.be/HNX8nBQDV7A

Crystallized Moment in Time:

http://youtu.be/ucoDBUsytHs