It’s another Monday, and another day just flat out made for a slash-and-burn romp through the newspapers. Today’s papers once again evoked in me that old graveyard laugh. I’m not becoming a curmudgeon, I promise. It’s just that my ruminations have begun to float free of my conscious control. In other words, I just can’t […]

Leaving the wreckage of his London visit behind, Mitt Romney has gone to Jerusalem where he must hope better things await. London was a lost opportunity but ultimately unimportant; the Israel visit, however, matters much more to the ex-governor and to his campaign.The press almost always overlooks this, but the argument over Israel policy in […]

Over a series of recent posts, I’ve been looking at the energy revolution that is changing the look of the 21st centuries. Some countries are losers, but the US in particular stands to make big gains at home and in its foreign policy.On the whole, this news is about as good as it gets: trillions […]

When I was asked by the editors of the Financial Times to contribute to a series on the future of conservatism, I hesitated because it seemed to me that in both the US and Europe what was most needed was not a new form of conservatism but rather a reinvention of the left. For more […]

In May 2012 Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, proposed a ban on the sale in public places of large-sized containers (over 16 fluid ounces) of sugar-sweetened drinks. Most soda beverages will be affected. The ban will have to be promulgated by the city’s public health agency, which is controlled by the mayor—so […]

With the presidential race essentially tied and the final 100 days of the world’s most grueling marathon almost here, Governor Romney gave what was widely billed his first big foreign policy speech at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nevada.It was not a speech that will change the election or […]

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok highlights a fascinating exchange between super-VC Peter Thiel (AI interview here) and Google’s Eric Schmidt on the future of technology. Do read Tabarrok’s excerpts, and don’t neglect to read the whole thing over at CNN. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably say here that I sit on the […]

At least twice in my comments on Syria over the past several months I have dismissed the possibility that the Syrian opposition could summon the ability to storm the Assad regime’s “palace” and overthrow the regime by direct force. I have argued instead that the pressure mounted by the opposition was far more likely to […]

Get ready for an American century: that appears to be the main consequence of the energy revolution that is now causing economic and political experts to tear up their old forecasts all over the world. The new American century won’t be a repeat of the last one, but in some very important ways the world […]

The New York Times, which many years ago (when I came to America as a young man) was known as the Grey Lady of political and cultural conservatism, has more recently become an icon of progressive virtues. Its coverage of events dealing with homosexuality is extensive, possibly compulsive. One may expect, sometime between Labor Day […]