A little economic history goes a long way to show how money and debt interact. The Tea Party movement may have strange ideas about public policy, but its instincts on basics are not that far off the mark.

Thomas Carlyle hated the cocksureness of ideology, worried that the best of human qualities were being mangled by unbridled technology and commercialization, and struggled to reconcile a loss of traditional religious belief with the need for faith. Can anyone think of a reason to read such a 19th-century relic today?

I did not head off to work today meaning to write again about Syria, but some things just can’t be helped. I was launched into my current orbit by a remark in today’s Washington Post. Not coincidentally, perhaps, it was a sentence written in that telltale sign of basic journalistic fraud: weasely, evasive language that […]

The end appears nigh for Rick Santorum. Having waged a campaign that took nearly every commentator, pundit and strategist by surprise, Santorum has now gone from rising star to desperate longshot. Leading Republicans have become increasingly vehement in their calls for the former Pennsylvania senator to quit before voters in his home state go to […]

Does President Obama have a Jewish problem? Despite the best efforts of his Republican challengers to portray the president as too soft on Iran and too hard on Israel, a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests support for Obama among American Jews is as strong as ever. The poll also found that Israel was […]

When President Barack Obama announced the ‘surge and exit’ strategy for Afghanistan in December 2009, Delhi, like so many others, was surprised. The significant expansion of Indian influence in Afghanistan since the U.S. ousted the Taliban regime at the end of 2001 was rooted in the stability and security provided by the American and international […]

The U.S. exit from Afghanistan will have far-reaching strategic implications for all of Asia. The American preoccupation with a narrow conception of these implications ill serves the U.S. national interest.

On March 9, Guy Taylor of the Washington Times reported that the Treasury Department earlier in the week began investigating former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell for trafficking with terrorists. Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy picked up the story a day earlier.  Apart from a New York Times article on March 13, attention to the matter […]

Update: Today, April 6, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad declared an independent state in northern Mali, the first assertion of Tuareg control of Timbuktu, their old capital, since 1591.What do you think of when you see or hear the word “Tuareg”? Most Americans, I think, are left utterly blank by the sight […]

The latest foodie wisdom has it that there's something ennobling about killing what you eat, with coming face-to-snout with the pre-industrial wholesomeness of traditional ways of slaughtering our food animals. Just try explaining any of that to the rural poor of eastern Europe.