My review of That Used To Be Us, the new book by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, appears in this morning’s New York Times.  You can read it here.

For those of you who were out having a life this weekend, some highlights from Via Meadia’s weekend posts: If you have always wanted a fancy Italian Renaissance palazzo in Italy, this may be the chance you have been waiting for. The Italian government is selling historic real estate to help pay its debts. From […]

Badly needed wholesale change is coming to American medicine – Via Meadia has long predicted it – and the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein is also on the bandwagon. Between Robo-Doc prostate surgeons and ever-shrinking super computers, technology is changing how and who (or what) does medicine. Klein writes in the WaPo: … Most doctors right […]

Ross Douthat has a thoughtful piece in the NY Times today on the failure — so far — of the populist wing of the Republican Party to find candidates and policies that can compete at the presidential level.  He’s certainly right that figures like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Ron Paul and Herman Cain […]

The ink is hardly dry on Germany’s assent to the last bailout package, but Greece is already signalling that more money is needed — and fast.  The new and improved deficit targets set by the IMF and the European Union won’t be met, not this year and not next.  From Reuters: (Reuters) – Greece will […]

Greens are often and even usually wrong about some important policy issues but they are right about one big thing: we’ve got only one planet to live on and we ought to cherish and conserve it.  As a reminder of the fragile and precious creation that shelters and nurtures us, this 1-minute NASA time-lapse video […]

A full eleven days after Andrew Sullivan warned readers again about the “Christianist” menace, the unstoppable Christian hordes seem to have, well, stopped.The latest evidence that the teeming throngs of zealous Puritans aren’t going to establish a Cromwellian commonwealth that crushes freedom and empowers dour church elders to monitor the private lives of Americans comes […]

American public education has hit a new low: concerned parents are being arrested for stealing free public education through zoning fraud. From the WSJ: In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts. These arrests represent two […]

Via Meadia blog-sibling Religion and Other Curiosities by Peter Berger (one of the world’s greatest living sociologists) has a terrific post on German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ recently discovered respect for Judeo-Christian religion.  The intellectual leader of the modern European center-left has come to acknowledge late in his life that Biblical, Judeo-Christian religion is a vital […]

The Arab Spring has reached its first autumn, and it is still not clear whether Egypt will have a revolution.  In my view, it hasn’t had one yet.  The Mubarak family attempted a revolution of its own early in the year, replacing the military-business regime that has ruled the country since the 1950s with a […]