France gave the modern world the political idea of progress, and even today the French still ardently believe their politics must be both trailblazing and without precedent. Thus, in his successful run for the presidency, François Hollande could stake his fortunes on “changement.” He modelled France’s first get-out-the-vote “ground game” on the Obama 2008 playbook, and […]

Few readers will be surprised to learn that decades of incompetence and entrenched corruption in Detroit’s government have not only helped wreck the city; firms linked to former Democratic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick also looted the pension fund.The latest scandal, which leaves even hardened observers of the abysmal Democratic machine that has run the city into […]

The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square by Steven A. Cook Oxford University Press, 2011, 424 pp., $27.95 Adam Garfinkle: Your new book on Egypt certainly is timely, but we both know that the lead-time to produce a book of this kind, one with history, with real substantive analysis, is quite long. I […]

No good deed goes unpunished; this must be what US Ambassador to China Gary Locke must have been thinking as a firestorm of criticism erupted over his embassy’s handling of the Chen Guangcheng case. Under great pressure, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner arriving for high profile talks with China’s […]

Reading the New York Times at breakfast is more than a habit. It is a sort of addiction. One experiences withdrawal symptoms in places where the paper is not available (especially when the only alternative is USA Today). At least in this country, the Times has no serious rival for good international news coverage, by […]

Now that the Obama White House has lost that shiny, new-president feel, and hope and change has turned into more of the same, gridlock is back in Washington and fury beyond the Beltway. With the distinctly uninspiring prospect of an Obama-Romney battle stretching endlessly across an infinite series of news cycles all the way to […]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be arriving in Beijing at perhaps the diciest moment in US-China relations since Richard Nixon reached out to shake Chou Enlai’s hand on his historic visit to what American conservatives then still called Red China.Last fall, the Obama administration pulled off a diplomatic revolution in maritime Asia — the […]

In a truly disturbing blog post at TNR, Timothy Noah has identified one of those national trends that shows where this country is headed, and not in a nice way: internships for sale. As Noah points out, private schools are selling internships in charity auctions; obviously, this gives privileged kids a pretty good leg up […]

One characteristic the blogosphere shares with the legacy media is an endless fascination with itself; increasingly, academics are jumping into the conversation about the nature and the consequence of this dynamic new medium. According to a recent paper by Aaron Shaw (a PhD candidate in sociology at Berkeley) and Yochai Benkler (a Harvard law professor known for his writings on collaboration […]

On April 6, 2012, Religion News Service carried a story originally reported in the Dallas Morning News. Judge Martin Hoffman, of the Dallas district court, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Mikey Weinstein against Gordon Klingenstein. Weinstein, a former Air Force lawyer, is an avowed atheist and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which opposes […]