Wiener’s new book How We Forgot the Cold War is a travelogue of visits to sites across the US (plus one in Cuba and one in Grenada) where the Cold War is publicly commemorated. As different as they are—among them are half a dozen presidential libraries, a general’s tomb, missile silos, a VIP fallout shelter, a CIA museum that’s closed to the public, and a proposed $100 million Victims of Communism museum, a grandiose project that was never built—all of them are notable for a curious lacuna: the Cold War itself, or perhaps more accurately, the neo-conservative, triumphalist narrative about the Cold War that has been so successfully projected onto the memory of Ronald Reagan.

On December 2, 1942, a small group of physicists under the direction of Enrico Fermi gathered on an old squash court beneath Alonzo Stagg Stadium on the Campus of the University of Chicago to make and witness history. Uranium pellets and graphite blocks had been stacked around cadmium-coated rods as part of an experiment crucial to the Manhattan Project–the program tasked with building an atom bomb for the allied forces in WWII.

The fact that the voters in two states so overwhelmingly supported the change is making it much easier for politicians, government officials, and prominent public figures to speak out for the idea.

Dr. Barry Commoner, scientist, activist, educator and one of the founders of the modern environmental movement, died on September 30 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 95.

I met Dr. Commoner in 1980, when he brought his third-party campaign for US president to my university. Running as the candidate of the Citizens Party, which he helped found, Commoner didn’t command an auditorium. Instead, Commoner sat in what I remember as a smallish classroom, discussing the state of the world with an egalitarian equanimity. He knew he wasn’t going to win the election, but he had things he wanted to explain, and a level of participation he wanted to motivate.

When running against Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan asked the American people if they were better off than they were four years ago. The phrase perfectly summarized in the most basic terms how democracy often winds up working. When things are going well, you don’t break what is working, but when things are going bad, it makes sense to try something new. If Romney were to ask voters in swing states that same question this year, he would receive a clear no, according to Gallup.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) points out, “On June 26, 1987, exactly twenty-five years ago, the Convention Against Torture became binding upon the nations that had ratified it.” So, today is not just some international day the United States and other powerful countries in the world will pay lip service to. Twenty-five years ago, an anti-torture convention was passed that the US then disregarded and violated explicitly when Bush was in power.

Fatster’s daily roundup of news you may have missed from Monday, June 25, including stories about Syrian women, Syrian rebels, Silvio Berlusconi, Zeke Emanuel, record corporate profits, Jimmy Carter, watching drone strikes, Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, Darrell Issa, Joe Biden, Loch Ness Monster, voter suppression, Ruch Limbaugh, Apple wages, oil workers, and much more.

Former US president Jimmy Carter penned a column for the New York Times that was published today. He condemns the United States’ widespread violations of human rights in the past decade. He cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed in 1948 as something the US adopted, but it now violates “at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles including the prohibition against ‘ cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Now that Mitt Romney is fully in general campaign mode, a theme he seems to bet hitting recently is trying to tie President Obama to former President Jimmy Carter. Mitt has now made at least two comparisons of Obama to Carter with the apparent goal of linking them in people’s minds. But this tactic may only work with older voters.

President Obama’s average job approval rating in November, exactly one year from his possible re-election, was very low by historic standards. According to Gallup only one previous modern regularly elected president had a lower average job approval rating in the November of the third year of his term and that was Jimmy Carter.