It’s been a dramatic week in the long-running nuclear talks between Iran and the six major powers (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany). With Secretary of State John Kerry and other foreign ministers flocking to Geneva, there is a possibility that at least a partial and temporary agreement between Iran […]

This is not a post, dear reader, so much as a referral.  On November 5 Tablet Magazine ran a feature the editors there asked me to prepare.  It can be accessed at tabletmagazine.com.  I foretold of this in my October 2 post, “Once Again, Jews Is News.”I sent my copy in on October 1, right […]

Conflicts over language have occurred periodically all through history—command of sacred languages marking priestly hierarchies, languages of conquerors imposed upon or submissively adopted by the conquered, language as symbolizing class differences. Even today language is at the center of important political conflicts: between Catalan and Castilian in Spain, Flemish and French in Belgium, in campaigns […]

Unde malum et quare? Where does evil come from and why does it exist? That has always been one of the big questions; over at Bloomberg News, former White House macher and Samantha Power super-spouse Cass Sunstein says he’s solved at least one part of the riddle: he’s figured out the from whence and why […]

Some events rise to the level of civilizational challenges, given just the right historical circumstances. Ukraine’s trajectory in the coming months and years will prove to be one such event, for the path it chooses will determine more than just its own fate. Its choice will serve as a test of Russia’s role, showing us […]

Sometimes, the Nobel Peace Prize has a frontrunner, or perceived frontrunner, as it did ten years ago. That year, Pope John Paul II was the favorite. Václav Havel, the Czech leader, was also in the mix. But the 2003 prize went to an Iranian human-rights lawyer, Shirin Ebadi. She had not even known she was […]

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in the Northeast, and many lives are still disrupted by the consequences of the storm. Below are our thoughts from last year, when the storm first hit.While the lights went out across Manhattan and the city that calls itself the capital of the world was […]

The modern Fordist paradises of the industrial world have seen their birthrates crater to the point that mass immigration is the only thing that can keep their economies staffed. This is riskier than it looks. The industrialized West is undertaking a historic experiment in real time: by allowing and even encouraging mass immigration from countries […]

Most human beings are not logicians. They muddle through life with beliefs and values that often do not hang together logically. I think that, basically, this is good news. Rigorously consistent doctrines, in politics as in religion, have a tendency to become murderous. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz (in his wonderful book The Labyrinth of […]

Much has been written on whether the European Union and Ukraine will sign agreements on association, free trade and, just as important if not more so for average Ukrainians, visa liberalization. Lots of analysis also has zeroed in on how Russian President Vladimir Putin and his minions have approached the Ukraine-EU relationship, using threats and […]