For more than 2000 years, the Chinese political system has been built around a highly sophisticated centralized bureaucracy, which has run what has always been a vast society through top-down methods.  What China never developed was a rule of law, that is, an independent legal institution that would limit the discretion of the government, or […]

Good news from the Metropolitan Opera, sort of.In a moment of stark idiocy, the powers that be at the Metropolitan Opera decreed that Opera News, a magazine published by the Met and sent to its patrons and donors, would no longer run reviews of opera productions at the Met.The problem, apparently, was that some reviews […]

It may be a holiday weekend in the United States and much of Europe (where the Monday after the feast of Pentecost is often celebrated as a holiday), but the world’s politicians, central bankers and financiers are too busy quaking in their boots to bask in the sun.The problem is Spain, which dropped two stink […]

It used to be, I think, that the vast majority of strategists and statesmen played chess, or in non-Western cultures some comparably complex game that required players to anticipate what their opponents might do in an extended sequence of moves. This was good training for the real world. If you read in the history of […]

One of the several reasons that every civilization, even every culture short of the august status of a civilization, has something like a religion is that it defines the boundaries between who is in the group and who is outside of it.

The European monetary crisis is like a botched root canal: painful, expensive, interminable. Weeks, months and even years go by and the world helplessly sits in the chair as the incompetent dentists poke, scrape, bicker and endlessly, endlessly drill.  From time to time there are shots of Novocaine—usually in the form of liquidity injections from […]

In the mid-1980s, when David Martin began his pioneering studies of Pentecostalism, this phenomenon was the elephant in the living room of the scholarly study of religion: It was well on the way of  becoming the fastest growing religious movement in history—from scattered groups in the early years of the twentieth century to what is […]

For much of the American public, Mitt Romney remains a cipher. As Via Meadia has noted previously, Romney has too often ceded control of his personal narrative to the press and his opponents, making him particularly vulnerable to countless attacks on his character and to damaging stories like the account of his prep school days. […]

The following is an excerpt from Colin Powell’s book It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership Although it has been many years since I gave my famous—or infamous—Iraq WMD speech to the UN and the world, I am asked about it or read about it almost every day. February 5, 2003, the day of […]

The news from Syria in recent days is more of the same—bad—except for when it is worse than bad. On Saturday a suicide bombing in Deir ez-Zour, apparently aimed at a regime target, killed 9 people and wounded more than eight dozen others. Coming after the suicide bombings in Damascus on May 10, these kinds […]