America’s Polarized Public: A Reply to Fiorina In his essay, “America’s Missing Moderates: Hiding in Plain Sight”, Morris Fiorina reprises many of the claims that he and his co-authors have made in books such as Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, and Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics. The central argument […]

Nearing the end of his second term, George W. Bush sought to salvage Russian-American relations with a visit to Sochi in April 2008, but then a few months later, Russia’s invasion of Georgia brought the bilateral relationship to its lowest point in twenty years. President Obama came to office intent on repairing the relationship and […]

Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left By Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell PublicAffairs, 2012, 320 pp., $26.99 Adam Garfinkle: What are you and your co-author, Hank Campbell, trying to accomplish in your new book? Alex Berezow: We’re both science writers, and we’ve noticed that the media likes to paint […]

The November elections confirmed that instability is the watchword in U.S. politics today. The only similar period in our history is the late 19th century—when the political economy was also being buffeted by rapid technological and social change.

Continuing breakthroughs in neuroscience have given rise to shelves full of new books wherein interpreters and popularizers propose to tell us what it all means. Several have taken on the neurochemistry of right and wrong.

Even Jewish self-hatred, in contemporary America no less than in Weimar Germany, bears a characteristically Jewish form.

Universal Studios has refurbished and reissued some of its classic horror fare going back to the early 1930s. Some of this stuff turns out to be scarier than ever, for reasons you wouldn’t expect.

D ecember 2012 saw the passing of the great development economist, Albert O. Hirschman, at the age of 97. Development economists spend their time these days performing randomized controlled experiments, in which a particular intervention like co-payments for mosquito bed nets are introduced into one group of villages and not into another matched set. This […]

The contemporary vocabulary of “American Exceptionalism” comes to us courtesy of doctrinaire Communists and Catholics, from as recently as the 1930s. Really.

Filibusters, the foibles of the Senate, and the trials and tribulations of campaign finance reform.