After a full and fair trial, abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell was convicted this week on three counts of first-degree murder in the killing of three babies whose necks he “snipped,” as well as involuntary manslaughter in the death of patient Karnamaya Mongar. Gosnell, who performed hundreds of gruesome and macabre abortions out of his Women’s […]

The attack on the Boston marathon vividly highlighted, with anguish unparalleled in the post-9/11 period, the security challenge posed to the United States by terrorism. Unlike the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, however, these attacks were perpetrated not by terrorists from the Middle East or Southeast Asia but from the Russian North […]

The big news two days ago was the announcement, by Secretary Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, of plans to hold a conference on Syria sometime this month. Now, if this conference—assuming it ever happens—can stop the civil war and lead to a relatively smooth landing (“smooth” in this case is a very elastic […]

Of the Big Five questions facing America today, the most pressing and urgent is the question of jobs. This is more than the problem of recovering from the last economic slump; it is more than the impact of globalization and automation on manufacturing jobs. The American economy is shedding jobs, especially long-term, well-paying jobs with […]

Editors’ note: What follows is the seventh part of an exchange on Russian-Western relations following from David Kramer and Lilia Shevtsova’s monthly column at The American Interest Online (see especially their February 21 essay, “Here We Go Again: Falling for the Russia Trap“). The exchange, a complete listing of which may be found below, has also provoked […]

Peter Berger is away on travel this week. Regular posting will resume later this month. 

It may be that, even as I am writing this very sentence, a mid-level State Department official named Gregory Hicks is testifying before a Senate Committee and, in effect, connecting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (never mind the hapless Susan Rice) to a cover-up in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, […]

So far, 2013 has been a bush league year in American politics. Gay marriage, gun control and amnesty for illegal immigrants are hot button emotional issues and they have a lot of practical importance for a lot of people, but the republic will not stand or fall based on lesbian prenups, gun background checks or […]

The Syrian civil war exploded over the weekend, with mass murder and sectarian cleansing along the coast, Israeli airstrikes in Damascus, and confusion, frustration and paralysis in Washington to the point where the New York Times described President Obama as trapped “in a geopolitical box, his credibility at stake with frustratingly few good options.”Foreign policy, it […]

Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage by Michael R. Veach University Press of Kentucky, 2013, 224 pp., $24.95 I began reading Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage, by Michael R. Veach, with a hangover manifesting itself as a throbbing headache, courtesy of the titular drink. I hoped that by the time I finished the book, […]