Links of the Day for 13 December 2007

• Inventing Alexander Hamilton: The troubling embrace of the founder of American finance by William Hogeland (Boston Review, Nov/Dec 2007) – a critique of contemporary politicians adopting Hamilton as the originator of modern America (and how they may be right but not in the way they think):
  • “To the extent that he thought about it at all, Hamilton wanted people to stop talking nonsense about their own economic aspirations and get ahead his way and his way alone, by becoming efficiently organized laborers and farm workers for the financiers and industrialists. If people wouldn’t do that, he’d make them.
• Bonfire of the Disney Princesses by Barbara Ehrenheich (The Nation, 12/11/2007) – a peasant revolt against a pink, frilly tyrant.
• Humans are still evolving – and it’s happening faster than ever by Ian Sample (The Guardian, 12/11/2007) –
  • “Humans are evolving more quickly than at any time in history, researchers say. In the past 5,000 years, humans have evolved up to 100 times more quickly than any time since the split with the ancestors of modern chimpanzees 6m years ago, a team from the University of Wisconsin found.”