In the last couple of years I’ve been writing about the death of the blue social model. By that I mean that the characteristic form of 20th century industrial democracy has come unglued, and that the advanced industrial democracies around the world must adjust to basic changes in the way the world works.For those who missed […]

On January 7, 2013, the New York Times carried a story about the race to fill the Congressional seat in Chicago vacated by the resignation (apparently for both health and legal reasons) of Jesse Jackson, Jr. The district is still strongly African-American, though less so than it used to be because of recent remapping. The […]

As often happens, my colleague Walter Russell Mead, with his team of intrepid assistants ever at the ready, has beaten me into print—or electrons, as the case may be—over what is going on in Mali. He takes his cue from the extraordinary story in yesterday’s New York Times. Pardon me for repeating any of Walter’s […]

In the grim opening moments of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s highly anticipated and controversial follow-up to The Hurt Locker, recordings of distress calls and screams amid the harrowing attacks of September 11 echo over a black, blank screen. A ten-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden plays out over the next two hours. It’s an […]

On December 29, 2012, the New York Times carried an article by Samuel Freedman, who is on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and who regularly writes in the religion column of the Times. The article is entitled “In a Crisis, Humanists seem Absent”. It dealt with the strong religious […]

“Pakistan’s continuing support of Operation Enduring Freedom has been critical to our success so far in toppling the Taliban and routing out the Al Qaeda network. Yet President Musharraf has made an even broader commitment. He has declared that Pakistan will be an enemy of terrorism and extremism wherever it exists, including inside his own […]

We must fix the health care system (and no, folks, we have not already done that).If we can get the plutocrats back on their heels by cordoning off the impact of television on our moneyed politics, reforming the banking/financial sector and the tax structure, we might then be in a position to really and seriously […]

Good Italy, Bad Italy: Why Italy Must Conquer Its Demons to Face the Future by Bill Emmott Yale University Press, 2012, 304 pp., $30 Italy is a large and prosperous country but one that has never sat comfortably among the great powers. During the 1950s, it was home to Europe’s strongest communist party—a party that, […]

Republicans are poised to take the semi-deserved brunt of public anger after the maddening fiscal cliff “showdown”, a further hit to a brand already tarnished by the 2012 election results. To all the political theorists, intellectuals, and social scientists cooking up strategies to revive the party, I say: Watch more TV. I don’t mean, of […]

2012 saw the passing of a great development economist, Albert O. Hirschman, at the age of 97.Development economists spend their time these days performing randomized controlled experiments, in which a particular intervention like co-payments for mosquito bed nets are introduced into one group of villages and not into another matched set. This approach establishes causality […]