Just a few selected comments on this weekend’s newspaper reading, as it were.First, in the New York Times “Week in Review” section under the headline “Our Decade of Deluded Thinking,” an unsigned author makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not fall […]

Tensions flared Friday at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen as China’s Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei, using unusually blunt language, described U.S. Chief Negotiator Todd Stern as “irresponsible”, according to an AP report. The Chinese official was responding to comments Stern made at the conference yesterday regarding the possibility of Western aid to […]

I am probably the only person in the United States who actually likes the fact that President Obama set an 18 month timetable for the beginning of a drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan in his speech on Tuesday night. Republicans have been attacking it because they say that it sends a signal of weak […]

Today’s headline in the Washington Post tells us that our Ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, opposes the sending of more U.S. and allied troops to Afghanistan, putting him at odds with the commanding general in that war, General Stanley McChrystal. Eikenberry happens to be a general, too—3-star instead of 4-star, but who’s counting? The […]

Have the French lost their knack for culinary exceptionalism?

Published more than thirty years ago, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism still stimulates, still frustrates.

Few differences between Europe and the United States have proven as enduring as the “religion gap.” Almost 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America: “On my arrival, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention.” And then he noticed something more astounding: “In France I […]

Prestige architecture casts long shadows over Third World cityscapes.

Declinists and triumphalists alike forget that the future is not fore-ordained; it’s ours to shape.

How freewheeling bankers used offshore secrecy jurisdictions to escape regulation and contribute to the global economic crisis.