I really cannot resist commenting on two phenomena that seem quite different in nature but whose simultaneity suggests a few curmudgeonly observations. I am of course still on curmudgeon alert, but I can’t get to my real work today until I get these observations off my chest.First, about Washington’s earthquake yesterday early afternoon. There isn’t […]

With the forces of humanitarianism and international law, or at least the forces of his tribal and religious enemies, closing in on his Tripoli lair, Africa’s King of Kings and Loon of Loons is on the verge of overthrow. And in Damascus, Butcher Assad, the world’s most notorious opthamologist, watched the Great Loon’s last stand […]

Besides healing the planet and returning the rising seas to their natural beds, then-Senator Obama promised that his administration would create beautiful green jobs: well paid, stable, abundant jobs, unionized, with full benefits and making the earth healthier and the American people richer. As President, he stayed on message: even after the truther-enabling “green jobs […]

With the Middle East in flames and news coming faster than governments can react, nothing is more important than to step back from the fray, take a deep breath and get some perspective.  Historical perspective.  That is particularly true when looking at what historians may consider the most important change in the Middle East recent […]

Moment is a journal on Jewish affairs, founded in 1975 by Elie Wiesel and currently edited, with great imagination and verve, by Nadine Epstein. In its issue of July-August 2011 it carries a cover story, with a shorter piece, on Jewish thinking about life after death. A symposium ranges across the spectrum of contemporary Judaism. […]

The Obama Administration needs to be bolder in reforming the two government-sponsored mortgage giants.

I have not written in this space on Libya, and the Western intervention therein, since March 22—just days after some $350 million worth of U.S. cruise missiles commenced the NATO campaign against the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. That is nearly five months ago, in a war that was supposed to be over in days, not […]

In one of those lapses of news judgment that with regrettable frequency make mainstream journalists resemble characters in Scoop, the media herd that gathered in Wisconsin to chronicle the great Democratic triumph in the state senate elections has gone back to the coasts — and missed what could grow into a much more consequential story […]

Leila Ahmed, who teaches at the Harvard Divinity School, is the author of a recently published book, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America. She tells a very interesting story.Ahmed originally comes from a middle-class background in Egypt. In her early years no women in her circle were veiled, even […]

“The information contained in our shared [genome] is so fundamental, and requires so much further research to understand its utility, that patenting it at the earliest stage is like putting up a whole lot of unnecessary toll booths on the road to discovery”, said National Institutes of Health Director and former head of the Human […]