Should we talk to terrorists? Yes, but how and when?

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.

[T]he Germans are the most impenetrable, hardest to define, most contradictory, least transparent, most incalculable, most surprising and self-intimidating of any people. They escape easy definition. —Friedrich NietzscheHas Germany become more normal over the past two decades? More normal than what? Today’s Federal Republic behaves quite logically for the situation in which Germany finds itself, […]

Before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, economic theory trumped economic history; no longer. But what does that history tell us?

Why IKEA is just as bad as Wal-Mart.