It’s too late in the 2012 campaign season for an October surprise. But it isn’t too late for an early November surprise. With President Obama apparently now behind in the projected popular vote (although who knows with these polls?), what are the chances that he will order a strike in the next day or two, […]

Dear readers,Professor Berger was stranded by Hurricane Sandy in Germany and therefore did not have the opportunity to write an essay this week. He is on his way back to the United States now, and will resume writing again next week.–– DM

The first sentence uttered to describe the U.S.-Chinese relationship in the third and final presidential debate was President Obama’s, and it contained both the words “adversary” and “partner.” Messaging doesn’t get much more mixed than that, and the President’s opponent, Mitt Romney, was not much clearer. In such a hotly contested election, we might be […]

Why Nations Fail, by Professors Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson has deservedly gained right of entry to the pantheon of Big Books on economic development.Like the pantheon’s other occupants, most recently—Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules for Now, Acemoglu and Robinson’s work tackles one of the biggest questions […]

It was the summer of 2000, and the situation for Egypt’s fledgling civil society community was looking dire. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a prominent sociologist, had just been dragged from his home and jailed by longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. The 61-year-old academic was held without formal charges for weeks and then prosecuted for a nebulous array […]

While the lights went out across Manhattan tonight, and the city that calls itself the capital of the world was cut off from the mainland as flood waters thundered through its streets, many people around the world watched the spectacle and were reminded just how fragile the busy world we humans build around us really […]

A week out from the U.S. election, the left-leaning London Guardian runs with a piece praising Jeb Bush’s education reforms in Florida—and touting Bush as the source of Obama’s own ideas on education reform. For over a decade now, schools in Florida have been graded from A to F based on the performance and progress […]

A reasonably sentient reader might think that between globalization/automation causes and our political/institutional dysfunction, there is nothing left to account for in order to explain what’s wrong with the United States these days. That would be wrong. In my view, more of the variance that explains our parlous present circumstances lies in this third group […]

Three states form the base of Democratic political power in the United States: California, New York and Illinois. All three states are locked in an accelerating economic, demographic and social decline; all three hope that they can stave off looming disaster at home by exporting the policies that have ruined them to the rest of […]

Many Republicans sincerely believe that if Barack Obama wins a second term as President, America as we know it may cease to exist. Some Democrats are equally passionate in their belief that a Romney election would fundamentally alter the social contract, return us to disastrous Bush policies, and maybe get us into a war with […]