Congress’s failure to pass a farm bill this year owes much to a grand but outdated political bargain pairing rural and urban interests.

We’ve long assumed that fraying families are a natural consequence of secularization. What if it’s the other way around?

Texas is challenging California for the right to be called the harbinger of the nation’s future. How does its claim hold up?

What we remember has a lot to do with how we remember it.

What do the spray-painted New York subway cars of the 1980s have in common with the graffiti-covered walls of the Arab Spring?

Turkey’s recent civil strife, seemingly centered on the future of Gezi Park, has laid bare some deep historical wounds.

The former chief of staff of the Turkish military was sentenced to life in prison today at a high security prison west of Istanbul. Retired General Ilker Basbug was among dozens of people convicted on charges that included plotting to overthrow the government, running death squads, and organizing a terrorist network called Ergenekon. The FT reports: Others sentenced included Veli […]

Media reports indicate that the White House is rethinking President Obama’s travel to Moscow in early September for a bilateral meeting with Vladimir Putin immediately before Russia hosts the G20 summit in St. Petersburg. Obama indeed should not go to meet with Putin, but the reasons for such a cancelation go well beyond those suggested […]

A New Era in U.S. Health Care: Critical Next Steps Under the Affordable Care Act by Stephen Davidson (Stanford University Press, 2013), 128 pp., $12.99It’s a bad time to be a supporter of the Affordable Care Act. Public support for the law remains low, and seems to be getting lower. Moderate and conservative Democrats who backed […]

Have you noticed that a particular word is cropping up more and more in our political discourse? The word “dysfunctional” is increasingly used to describe the world we are living in. Zigmunt Bauman has offered another word to describe our times: “interregnum”, a void separating past and future.Some authors seem to think that we can […]