Yuval Noah Harari

Combat Flow : Military, Political, and Ethical Dimensions of Subjective Well-Being in War

The theory of flow argues that subjective well-being results from absorption in an activity that strikes a good balance between challenges and skills. This absorption has been termed flow. Such absorption is often reported in combat situations, in which it contributes both to the subjective well-being and to the efficiency of soldiers. This article suggests that combat flow may have been central to military training and military performance throughout history. The study of combat flow could therefore shed new light on military history and form the basis for the development of new training techniques. The article simultaneously probes the ethical and political implications of manipulating the subjective well-being of soldiers in such a way. It cautions scholars of flow and subjective well-being that they should be aware of the ethical and political implications of their studies and warns against the dangerous political results of equating subjective well-being with happiness. The article further calls for greater cooperation between psychologists and historians in the study of well-being.

Military Memoirs: A Historical Overview of the Genre from the Middle Ages to the Late Modern Era

The article surveys the history of military memoirs in the west from the Middle Ages to the late modern era. It examines the relation of military memoirs to other literary and historiographical genres, such as conversion narratives, service records, and oral life-stories. It focuses in particular on the rising visibility of memoirs composed by common soldiers and junior officers. The article then analyses the historiographical importance of this genre, and the unique contributions it can make to the study of military history. It emphasizes the genres relevance to the study of military command, of military culture, and of the experience of war.

Neighborhood Preserving Hashing and Approximate Queries

Let

Introduction: War as Revelation, 1865–2000

D \subseteq \Sigma^n

Suffering, Death, and Revelation in Early Modern Culture

be a dictionary. We look for efficient data structures and algorithms to solve the following approximate query problem: Given a query

The Rise of the Common Soldier

u \in \Sigma^n

Why War Revealed Nothing

list all words

Bodies Begin to Think

v \in D

The Rise of the Revelatory Interpretation of War

that are close to u in Hamming distance. The problem reduces to the following combinatorial problem: Hash the vertices of the n-dimensional hypercube into buckets so that (1) the c-neighborhood of each vertex is mapped into at most k buckets and (2) no bucket is too large. Lower and upper bounds are given for the tradeoff between k and the size of the largest bucket. These results are used to derive bounds for the approximate query problem.

Conclusions: The Things Which Make You Know, 1865–2000

‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,’ said Samuel Johnson in 1778. ‘Were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say, “Follow me, and hear a lecture on philosophy;” and Charles, laying his hand on his sword, to say, “Follow me, and dethrone the Czar;” a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates.’1