R2P can be a prod for effective humanitarian intervention, but not a recipe suited to particular cases. Implementation can improve, but it will never be easy.

Calculating the costs of U.S. political campaigns over time is no simple task, but it doesn’t take an expert statistician to know that things have gotten out of hand.

Understanding rogue or “outlier” states, and figuring out how to deal with them, remains a major international security challenge. Two books would tutor us, one more successfully than the other.

Tom Graham’s wide-ranging “Response to the Critics” included a question for me, in his fourth paragraph. He saw an inconsistency between, on the one hand, my view that Putin’s crackdown over the first year of his latest Presidency has been internally generated and was not a response to U.S. pressure, and, on the other hand, […]

Visiting Cuba is like taking a journey in a time machine. The streets are filled with 1950s-era cars. The buildings are vintage art deco (albeit often with crumbling facades). Sounds of Caribbean and African rhythms, often produced by elderly musicians, fill the air. Cuba, however, far from stuck in a time-warp, is in fact a […]

Noble intentions and some benign outcomes notwithstanding, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act has proved to be a very expensive legal monstrosity with dubious constitutional credentials.

Discerning the origins and nature of consciousness is the neuro- science challenge. Does “mind” reduce to “brain”, or not? If not, can information rolling recursively back on itself explain it?

Bee Wilson’s history of the fork—and other kitchen appurtenances—shows us that we are how we eat as well as what we eat. Culinary tools have reflected cultural dispositions in surprising ways, and continue to do so to this very day.

On May 29 thousands gathered on the shores of the Golden Horn in the historic neighborhood of Balat to celebrate the 560th anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul. It was the kind of early summer Istanbul evening that gives a slight taste of the thick humidity to come in June and July. The city’s […]

The Death of Corporate Reputation: How Integrity Has Been Destroyed on Wall Street by Jonathan R. Macey (FT Press, 304 pp., $39.99) AG: So what’s the basic thesis of your book, and what motivated you to write it?   Jonathan R. Macey: The basic thesis of the book is that the business model of firms […]