I’m finishing up a quick visit to Germany after the Turkey trip.  I stopped off in Hamburg to see Joe Joffe, another member of TAI’s editorial board, and met a group of his colleagues at Die Zeit.The short take: Obama remains very popular in Germany, but people are less sure about America.  The question here […]

Mars Bluff is a small town outside Florence, South Carolina, the town where all four of my grandparents lived for many years.  About fifty years ago it had its 15 minutes of fame when an atomic bomb fell out of an Air Force plane and exploded near the home of one Walter Gregg, injuring some […]

My recent trip to Turkey was an adventure in public diplomacy; I was in the country at the request of the State Department.  US diplomats abroad invite a variety of Americans to appear before foreign audiences for anything from jazz concerts and poetry readings to scientific presentations and talks on current events.  Wisely, the embassy […]

The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope met in Rome this week and their spokesmen issued statements with the usual platitudes.  One thing they could do to benefit mankind: agree to a joint crackdown on appalling liturgical wear like the ones at Christopher Johnson’s website Bad Vestments. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds the renowned Instapundit for […]

The BBC is carrying a story today about a 400 pound bomb left at a police station in Northern Ireland, apparently by ‘dissident’ members of the IRA.  On the same night, there was a gun battle between the dissidents and the police. Fortunately the bomb only partially exploded and the damage was limited.This is bad […]

I’m not sure what’s happening to the climate, but the controversy over global warming seems to be heating up.  The latest twist, an outcry over stolen emails that seem to document a nasty conspiracy among some climate scientists to silence and discredit their critics while manipulating evidence to strengthen the case for human responsibility for […]

Today we are commemorating (not, I think, celebrating) the anniversary of the first untethered hot air balloon flight in world history.  On November 21, 1783, two brave French adventurers rose into the heavens and were carried about nine miles across Paris in twenty five minutes.A heroic feat, no doubt, but as I prepare this morning […]

I’ve been back in Turkey for about thirty six hours, and I’m remembering all the reasons why I love this place.There is, for one thing, the sour cherry juice, something that is everywhere in Turkey but rarely seen anywhere else.  You can get it on airplanes, at breakfast in my hotel, in kiosks at the […]

Possibly because they assume I have no life and spend my time buried among the tottering piles of books and overstuffed bookshelves at the stately Mead manor in the storied and exclusive residential borough of Queens, my students and younger colleagues often ask me for advice about what to read.Many are surprised when I advise […]

It’s been almost twenty hours since I left the storied borough of Queens and I’ve spent most of that time in the air.I’m happy to be back in Turkey and looking forward to a series of meetings with Turkish academics and journalists.  This is a fascinating country and both Turkish society and Turkish foreign policy […]