Worldview: Volume 25 - | Cambridge Core

U.S. & Soviet Agriculture: The Shifting Balance of Power
Lester R. Brown
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06 September 2018, pp. 16-18
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Analyses of the U.S.-Soviet balance of power usually focus on relative military strength—the number of tanks, planes, nuclear warheads, and other items in the so-called strategic balance. But many other factors determine a country's overall power and influence. Among the most basic is a country's capacity to feed its people. By this measure the Soviet Union appears to be in deep trouble.
This year the USSR will try to import 46 million tons of grain, more than any country in history (source, here and elsewhere: U.S. Department of Agriculture). Nearly a fourth of all Soviet grain for feeding both people and livestock will come from the North American breadbasket, most of it from the United States.

Criticism and Culture
John E. Becker
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06 September 2018, pp. 16-19
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The urgency of our times has engendered demands for action, and action has followed: economic, political, diplomatic. We are concerned for the technical competence of those who are acting. But surely there are other and even more fundamental concerns. Action too easily distracts from the assumptions on which action is based. Many of those assumptions are born in that dark region of the popular imagination where nations define themselves in terms of basic myths of national mission and national identity. We are tempted by, and too easily succumb to, oversimple versions of those myths. Urgent as is our need for action, we need reflection more.
The basic instrument of reflection on national identity and mission is literature, and ours is incredibly rich, Literature has helped both to shape and to reveal that obscure popular imagination and has criticized the ways it has shaped itself.

Ideology and Development in Africa by Crawford Young (Yale University Press: xvii+376 pp.;
Aaron Sexal
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06 September 2018, pp. 21-22
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